Snapcraft 2.5

Hello snapcrafters!

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.5 of snapcraft: https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestone/2.5.
This release includes many improvements and features such as:

- A kernel (with cross compilation support) and kbuild plugin
- Experimental support for kernel snaps (this is a moving target).
- Initial support for better iterations with a better start tracker for parts.
- Support for downloading snaps.

We have also improved our testing, updated documentation and resolved the
unicode errors seen on some envionments.

To consume the latest snapcraft release on Xenial Xerus (16.04), we suggest you install the snapcraft package from the Ubuntu Archives:

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install snapcraft

If you don't want to consume the examples from the source branch you can also install the examples package:

    sudo apt install snapcraft-examples

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

To get the source for this release check it out at https://github.com/ubuntu-core/snapcraft/releases/tag/2.5

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

To file bugs, please go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapcraft/+filebug.

Happy snapcrafting,
 - Sergio and the team