You can find more information about snapcraft here: http://snapcraft.io/

To test it in an Ubuntu 16.04 machine:

$ sudo apt install git snapcraft
$ git clone https://github.com/elopio/tesseract
$ cd tesseract
$ git checkout snapcraft
$ snapcraft
$ sudo snap install *.snap --dangerous

(dangerous because the snap you build yourself doesn't come signed from the trusted store. Once you push it to the store, your users will just have to do $ sudo snap install tesseract)

The tessdata has to be stored in ~/snap/tesseract/common/.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

thanks for the merge @zdenop!

With a few commands you can make your first release to the store, and then maybe you could be interested in automating releases after the travis tests pass: https://snapcraft.io/docs/build-snaps/publish

Any feedback will be appreciated.