What’s been happening in your world?

What have you been up to?

— Arctic Monkeys, Snap out of it

So — here is what I have been up to:

The upcoming LibreOffice 5.2 packaged as a nice new snap package. This:

is pretty much a vanilla build of LibreOffice 5.2 beta2, using snapcraft, which is making packaging quite easy

contains all the applications: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, Base

installs easily on the released current LTS version of Ubuntu: 16.04

allows you to test and play with the upcoming LibreOffice version to your hearts delight without having to switch to a development version of Ubuntu

So — how can you “test and play with the upcoming LibreOffice version to your hearts delight” with this on Ubuntu 16.04? Like this:

wget http://people.canonical.com/~bjoern/snappy/libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap{,.sha512sum} sha512sum -c libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap.sha512sum && sudo snap install --devmode libreoffice_5.2.0.0.beta2_amd64.snap /snap/bin/libreoffice

and there you have a version of LibreOffice 5.2 running — for example, you can prepare yourself for the upcoming LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session. And its even quite easy to remove again:

sudo snap remove libreoffice

This is one of the things that snap packages will make a lot easier: upgrading or downgrading versions of an application, having multiple installed in parallel and much more. Watch out as there are more exciting news about this coming up!

Update: As this has been asked a few times: Yes, snap packages are available on Ubuntu. No, snap packages are not only available on Ubuntu. This text has more details.

Update 2: The original download included debug symbols and thus was quite big. The download now has 287MB. This post has all the details.