14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is working on their Snappy packages, but they also need to think about the shipping and packaging process. For this, they've put together a new application named snapcraft.
snapcraft is a new tool from Canonical that should allow users to package anything with all the requirements. Imagine that you have an application with Java dependencies that you want to package as a Snappy package. This is where snapcraft comes into play, and the application pulls everything that you will need from repos and completes the process in just a few steps.
"Enter snapcraft. A thing of beauty. Finally you can specify all relevant meta-data in one file, define that parts make up your app and snapcraft’s plugins (Go, Java, autotools, etc.) will take care of pulling and building sources and binaries, which files to ship exactly and everything else. It’s magic," wrote developer Daniel Holbach.
The new version of snapcraft, 0.2, comes with a more powerful syntax, stage-packages makes it easier to include content from Ubuntu packages, pip support now included in python3-project and python2-project plugins, a "snapcraft clean" command has been added, and many more other changes have been made.
The Snappy packages are still pretty far away from being the norm for the desktop distros, but they are getting there, and snapcraft is an important tool that will make the like of the developers much easier.