Release notes: Snapcraft 4.7

Snapcraft 4.7 is a feature-packed release, including:

• Validation sets for gated refresh control
• UA/ESM token support
• More architectures for the conda plugin and core20
• Desktop extension improvements around fonts

For general details, including installation instructions, see Snapcraft overview, or take a look at Snapcraft release notes for other Snapcraft releases.

Validation sets

A validation set is an assertion that lists specific snaps that are either required to be installed together or are permitted to be installed together on a device or system.

This release of Snapcraft adds two commands for working with validation sets:

• list-validation-sets
• edit-validation-sets

For more details, see Validation sets.

UA Token

At the end of April, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS reached the end of its five years of mainstream support and entered the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase.

To be able to continue building Ubuntu 16.04 LTS using the ESM base for local and on-premise builds, snap publishers and developers will need to obtain UA tokens. These tokens are free for all community users, for up to three machines, and up to 50 machines for Ubuntu members.

With this release of snapcraft, a new --ua-token argument can be used to specify a token:

snapcraft <step> --ua-token <token>

See Snapcraft and Extended Security Maintenance for further details.

Conda plugin

When using core20, the recently introduced conda plugin now supports more architectures, with the new ones being:

• i386 (x86)
• armhf (armv7l)
• ppc64el (ppc64le)

Extension improvements

Extensions now have better font handling by integrating a new snapd feature to not expose the host font cache to the snap
when using the desktop related extensions.

General cleanup into the launcher script which ensures a proper environment has been setup is also part of this release.

Store whoami migration

The snapcraft whoami command has fully migrated to the store whoami endpoint, enabling logged in users, either with the existing flow or the experimental one, to query for their identity.

Stage Snaps

The stage-snaps keyword now allows specifying channel branches. This solves a long standing request.

Full list of changes

• cli: introduce edit-validation-sets @sergiusens (#3512)
• cli: introduce list-validation-sets @sergiusens (#3510)
• extensions: don’t expose host system fontconfig cache @jhenstridge (#3509)
• storeapi: add binding for validations-sets @sergiusens (#3508)
• storeapi: add classes for validation sets @sergiusens (#3507)
• extensions/desktop: use fonts from $XDG_DATA_DIRS, and remove unnecessary includes @jhenstridge (#3504)
• cli, repo: add support for UA tokens @cjp256 (#3488)
• snaps: don’t validate snaps before SnapPackage.download() @Saviq (#3505)
• deb: do not filter python3 packages on core20 @cjp256 (#3503)
• Update Docker image instructions @abitrolly (#3499)
• conda v2 plugin: support for more architectures @sergiusens (#3495)
• snaps: do not validate snaps before install/refresh (Fixes LP#1901733) @Saviq (#3502)
• docker: Need to repeat ARG in every section @abitrolly (#3500)
• store: use whoami dashboard endpoint for cli @sergiusens (#3501)

Last updated 2 years ago.