Snapcraft 0.2

Snapcraft 0.2 is now available

Hi all,

Since the announcement we did back in August ( https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/08/03/java-on-snappy/ ) snapcraft has come a long way and we are happy to announce the availability of our first official checkpoint release snapcraft 0.2: https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestone/0.2

This release introduces quite a few improvements to our snapcraft.yaml, including:

     - support for a more powerful syntax to define and describe your binaries and services
     - the organize keyword that gives you fine grained control about the file tree structure exposed to the staging area and of the produced snap
     - the filesset keyword makes it easier for you select the files from your parts for your final snap
     - the after keyword supports to use parts collaboratively defined by the community on a wiki page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Snappy/Parts)
     - stage-packages makes it easier to include content from ubuntu packages in your snap wiithout the need for an Ubuntu plugin
     - a yaml schema that is used to validate the snapcraft.yaml making
     - the ability to define all metadata in snapcraft.yaml, without the need to ship a meta-data/ directory with a package.yaml

Further the plugins shipped saw improvements:
    - pip support now included in python3-project and python2-project plugins
    - no need to specify the module in the plugin definition
    - local plugins can be more conveniently developed and included in your project and don't need to use the x- prefix, they are searched for if no match is found in the main reposiory.

Also, the much requested "snapcraft clean" command got implemented as well as more tests and examples were added alongside a good chunk of bugs that got fixed that are listed on the milestone page linked above.

You will notice that this release introduces many breaking changes we felt were necessary to provide a neater and more solid snapcrafting experience. The improvements in the snapcraft.yaml format mean that projects using the old format need to be updated. The documentation for your first snap has been updated to reflect these changes https://developer.ubuntu.com/snappy/snapcraft/

To consume the latest snapcraft release on ubuntu, we suggest you install snapcraft package from the snappy tools release ppa:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snappy-dev/tools
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install snapcraft

If you prefer to keep tracking our daily trunk builds, use our tools-proposed ppa:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snappy-dev/tools-proposed
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install snapcraft

If you don't want to consume the examples from the source branch you can also get them from the ppas above:

    sudo apt-get install snapcraft-examples

After installing this you can find them in /usr/share/snapcraft/examples

To get the source for this release, you can branch lp:snapcraft/0.2. The trunk is available at lp:snapcraft.

A great place to collaborate and discuss features, bugs and ideas on snapcraft is snappy-app-devel mailing list (URL) or directly in the #snappy channel on irc.freenode.net.

To file bugs, please use our launchpad project: https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapcraft.

Happy snapcrafting,

 - Sergio and the team