I’ve been working on an experiment with Snap packaging. I really see a potential in these packages as they remove the curse of packaging an application to the very fragmented world of Linux distributions.

NetBeans to Apache movement is progressing slowly but steadily. After all the internal code reviews and donations happened in Oracle, there were still a bunch of task to be done to properly relicense the software. The team did a great job reviewing all the parts of the code used. They are about to announce the NetBeans 9.0 Beta soon.

What really make Snap packaging make the difference is the automation and distribution Canonical provides via snapcraft.io and the snapstore with it’s different release channels. I’d love to see more detailed documentation on Snapcraft (the tool which can create snap packages), but the provided one was enough to create something to start with.

You can test NetBeans 9.0 Beta rc2 on Linux if you already have a JDK, either Java 8 or Java 9 (recommended) installed.

wget https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/lkishalmi-us-west-2-public/snaps/netbeans_9.0-beta-rc2_amd64.snap
snap install netbeans_9.0-beta-rc2_amd64.snap --dangerous --classic

There are still many things needed to be done (see: NETBEANS-341). Any feedback is welcome.