14 DAY TRIAL // Today, March 22, 2016, Canonical's Sergio Schvezov announced the release of Snapcraft 2.5, the Snappy creator tool used to create and manage snaps for the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system.
According to the release announcement, Snapcraft 2.5 is here to introduce a kernel plugin with cross-compilation support, along with a kbuild plugin, which can be used for creating kernel snaps.
For now, creating kernel snaps is an experimental feature in Snapcraft but will soon reach production standard as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) will hit streets in less than one month from the moment of writing this article.
Among other interesting features implemented by Canonical in Snapcraft 2.5, we can mention support for downloading snaps, initial support for iterations, along with an improved start tracker for parts, updated documentation, and testing improvements.
"Hello Snapcrafters! We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.5 of Snapcraft," said Sergio Schvezov, software engineer at Canonical. "This release includes many improvements and features."
How to install Snapcraft 2.5 in Ubuntu
Canonical pushed the Snapcraft 2.5 update this morning into the software repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, so if you've updated your system in the last couple of hours you should have the new release.
Otherwise, you can install Snapcraft or update it to Snapcraft 2.5 in your Ubuntu operating system by running the following set of commands in the Terminal application included in the distribution.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install snapcraft
The Snapcraft examples have been updated as well, and you can install them for Snapcraft 2.5 if you execute the command below in the Terminal app, but not before you've updated Snapcraft using the commands above.
sudo apt install snapcraft-examples