Canonical To Focus On A New, More Modular Snapcraft - Current Codebase Goes Legacy

A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture.

Canonical is going to make the current Snapcraft codebase "legacy" while they are working their latest code into a new, more modular architecture. At the moment it's at a stage of "the early proof of concept only covers some aspects of the Snapcraft functionality, but it did illustrate a relatively quick conversion to the new modular design."

A lot of new code is to be written for improving the Snapcraft architecture but that seems to be what is on their agenda for 2022. While a radical change, they don't expect it to interrupt the current Snapcraft usage model and projects relying on core18/core20 states will continue to be able to leverage the monolithic "legacy" Snapcraft and when ready can transition to the new codebase.

The light blog post today concludes with, "To boldly go where no one has gone before. This is true for spacecraft as well as Snapcraft. Going forward, you should expect to see quite a few new, interesting developments in the product, all aimed at making things simpler, faster, more robust, and without adversely affecting the user experience."