New 2.20 snapd release

[Michael Vogt]

Hi,

The snappy team is happy to announce the 2.20 release of snapd!

This version of snapd is available in the candidate "core" snap and it
will be available in the {trusty,xenial,yakkety}-proposed archive of
Ubuntu soon [1]. Other distributions will follow shortly. Please note that
for the first time Trusty (Ubuntu 14.04) is included. This is still
experimental so we are keen to get your feedback.

My personal hightlight of this release is the "alias" support. 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, the downside is that scripts that assume the top
level mongodump command will not work. 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. In the near future, we'll also introduce default aliases which
are automatically setup unless the user explicitly disables them.

More hightlights from 2.20:
- support for aliases (top level commands)
- support for Ubuntu 14.04 has landed
- improved `snap info` output
- network interactions are more robust (more aggressive retry if needed)
- interfaces: dbus, network namespaces in network-control, iio,
  openswitch-support

In addition to this, all the goodness of the unpublished snapd 2.19 is
available, including:
- support for new "classic" confinement type which allows easy
  snapping of tools like gcc
- improve `snap info`: including info from any channel, snap size,
  descriptions, last refresh times
- more delta download support, based on xdelta3
- tab completion improvements on classic
- interface improvements: i2c, modem-manager
- support "daemon: notify" in snap.yaml
- ensure that `snap try` installs the core snap if it's missing
- documentation updates
- merge snap-confine and snapd into a single codebase

We hope you enjoy the new release! We are all very excited about these
new features and what they bring to the snap community. The
combination of classic confinement and aliases allow to create snaps
for a whole new class of software. Snapping software has never been
easier!

Most of the snappy team will be enjoying some time off in the next
couple of weeks, so please excuse us if we take slightly longer to
reply to feedback and suggestions over that period.

Happy snapping,
 Michael (on behalf of the snappy team)


[1] Its uploaded and needs approval from the SRU team. It is available
    already in zesty and in the ppa:snappy-dev/image PPA.