ANN: snapcraft 2.1 is now available

[Sergio Schvezov]

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce this release new version (2.1) of snapcraft:
https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestone/2.1

2.1 is a risky and ground breaking release as it introduces skills,
particularly use of the migration-skill. All the examples and relevant
documentation have been updated. Given the constant movement in this
rolling release, we expect a couple of iterations to get everything
polished either on the snapcraft or Ubuntu Core side. As a reference you
can check
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/snappy-devel/2016-January/001434.html

Additionally, you can now directly upload your snap using snapcraft
(given you have authenticated), check out
https://github.com/ubuntu-core/snapcraft/blob/master/docs/upload-your-snap.md
for detailed instructions. Speaking of which, there have been many
documentation updates, they should be making their way to
https://developer.ubuntu.com/snappy/snapcraft any time now.

Another interesting change is that we removed many base dependencies
from snapcraft so now not everyone needs to go through the burden of
installing so many dependencies when not needed (e.g.; mercurial when
only working with git, gcc when only working with pure java). Some
build-packages will need updating in snapcraft.yaml.

There have been many bug fixes as well, for details we invite you to
check the milestone on launchpad.

To consume the latest snapcraft release on Xenial Xerus, we suggest you
install the snapcraft package from the Ubuntu Archives:

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install snapcraft

If you don't want to consume the examples from the source branch you can
also install the examples package:

    sudo apt install snapcraft-examples

After installing this you can find them in
/usr/share/doc/snapcraft-examples/examples. There are some new examples
included in this release as well.

To get the source for this release check it out at
https://github.com/ubuntu-core/snapcraft/releases/tag/2.1

Las but not least, while 2.1 is out, we are already working on 2.2
https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestone/2.2

A great place to collaborate and discuss features, bugs and ideas on
snapcraft is snappy-app-devel mailing list or directly in the #snappy
channel on irc.freenode.net.

To file bugs, please go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapcraft/+filebug.

Happy snapcrafting,
 - Sergio and the team