Canonical is hard at work on its Snappy Packages, but it needs something to build and ship these types of packages easily. The application that solves these problems is called snapcraft. Snapcraft (not to be confused with Snapcraft, the server for the famous Minecraft) is a new tool created by Canonical that will allow users to package any application to create a ready-to-use package in Snappy.
What the snapcraft app does is get everything you need for packaging in the repositories and complete the packaging process in just a few easy steps. And all thanks to Canonical's developer Daniel Holbach. In addition, the new snapcraft 0.2 version has been released, which comes with a more powerful syntax, functions that make it easier to package and include the necessary content of Ubuntu packages, support for plugins, function to clean, and a list with many other changes.
The packages Snappy are far from becoming a standard for desktop distributions, but this little step from Canonical brings that goal even closer. Giving developers tools to advance a platform is one of the best things to do to 'promote' it. Now the life of those who wish to pack Snappys will be much easier and therefore will attract more interested parties.
By the way, for those who do not know what they are snappy packagesAlthough it has already been discussed in this blog, to say that it is proposed as a substitute for the DEB packages that currently dominate Debian and derived distributions, as is the case with Ubuntu. It aims to be the future of packages for desktop distros, with greater independence, security, self-contained packages (that do not break due to lack of a library), which allow transactional updates to previous versions, without the need for PPA, greater convergence , etc.
If they share libraries like APT then welcome, otherwise nothing differs from the windows .exe, and the truth does not convince me, we will have to see how they structure the packages and the digital signatures to see if they are safe.