Canonical has unveiled plans for a major overhaul of Snapcraft, the toolkit used to create, distribute, and update self-contained Snap packages. It is noted that the current Snapcraft codebase is deprecated (legacy) and will be used whenever older technologies are needed. The radical changes being developed will not impact the current usage modelāin projects related to Ubuntu Core 18 and 20 will continue to use the old monolithic Snapcraft, and the new modular Snapcraft will be used starting from the branch Ubuntu Core 22.
The old Snapcraft will be replaced by a new, more compact and modular version that will simplify the creation of snap packages for developers and eliminate the difficulties associated with creating portable packages suitable for working across different distributions. The basis for the new Snapcraft is the Craft Parts mechanism, which allows, when assembling packages, to receive data from different sources, process it in different ways and form a hierarchy of directories in the file system, suitable for deploying packages. Craft Parts involves the use of portable components in a project that can be independently loaded, assembled and installed.
The choice between the new or old Snapcraft implementation will be handled through a dedicated fallback mechanism integrated into the build process. This means that existing projects will be able to build snap packages without modification and will only require modification when migrating packages to a new version of the base system. Ubuntu Core.
Source: opennet.ru
