dryer lint

My team at work has been focused on snaps this year and one thing we’ve tried to do internally is establish a set of best practices for snap packaging software. Toward that end I’ve been working on a little tool I’m calling snaplint to encode those practices and verify that we’re following them.

Right now you can run snaplint against your snapcraft project directory
and it will scan the prime subdirectory for the following things:

  • copyright (basically that you included usr/share/doc/*copyright*) for
    any stage-packages
  • developer cruft (things like header and object files or static libs
    that might have made their way into your snap)
  • libraries (examine the ELF files in your snap and look for libraries
    which aren’t used)

The next things I’m planning on adding are:

  • checking for copyright info from apps/parts themselves.
  • checking for mixing of incompatible licenses

I would love to hear suggestions on further improvements.

You can find the source at https://github.com/ssweeny/snaplint

And, of course if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 or later you can try it on your own machine with:
$ snap install snaplint
$ snaplint path/to/your/project

Ubuntu 14.10

I’m at a sprint in Washington, DC with my fellow Canonicalers gearing up for the commercial release of our phone OS (more on that later) but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about the desktop and cloud.

Yesterday was another Ubuntu release day! We released Ubuntu 14.10, codenamed the Utopic Unicorn. Look for lots of subtle improvements to the desktop as we prepare some big things to come soon.

As usual, you can take a tour or go straight to the download page.

And while we’re at it, here’s to another 10 years of Ubuntu!

Trusty TahrAnother very exciting release of Ubuntu for desktops and phones (oh, and I guess servers and cloud too) is out the door!

This is a Long Term Support release, which means it’s supported for five years, and it’s the release I’ll be trying to install on friends’ and family’s computers at every opportunity.

As usual, you can take a tour or go straight to the download page.

Smarter and Faster

This is a very exciting release for me, not least because it’s the first official release of Ubuntu for Phones, which was the big focus for my team at Canonical this cycle. We worked on making it easy to spin up your own custom build of Ubuntu and helped out with fixing bugs wherever we could.

If you’re comfortable flashing your phone you can install Ubuntu with these instructions.

Of course, Ubuntu still rocks your socks on your desktop or laptop, so take the tour or go grab it!