Canonical’s Michael Vogt happily announced the release of the Snapd 2.20 stable build of the Snappy daemon used on Ubuntu Linux operating systems for providing out-of-the-box support for installing and running Snap universal packages.
Snapd 2.20 was released on the same day with Snapcraft 2.24, the tool app developers can use to package their applications as Snaps for cross-distro distribution. Snapd 2.20 is an important milestone that, for the first time, introduced support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system. It’s also available in the repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).
This is what’s new in Snapd 2.20
Since Snapd 2.19, which was announced a week ago, the new release introduces some exciting new features, such as “alias” support, better output for the “snap info” command, more robust network interactions that’ll be retried aggressively if required, as well as D-Bus and network namespaces support to the openswitch-support, iio, and network-control interfaces.
“As you are probably aware, snaps usually provide secondary commands as “$snap.$app”, e.g. mongo32.dump. While this is great and it means you can have monogo26 and mongo32 installed at the same time without command conflicts,” said Michael Vogt. “Aliases solve this problem by allowing a snap developer to setup well-defined aliases like mongo32.dump to mongodump, and users to control which aliases to enable.
Future releases of the Snapd Snappy daemon will introduce default aliases, which will be automatically configured if they aren’t disabled manually by the user. As mentioned before, Snapd 2.20 is now live in the stable repos of your favorite Ubuntu Linux operating system, along with Snapcraft 2.24, so please update at your earliest convenience.
