Calamares 3.3.0-alpha5 released

Nov 13, 2023

A month to the day, and we have reached the next – and also last – alpha release along the road to Calamares 3.3. More internal changes to cross off items on the TODO list: Boost can be replaced by pybind11 (and it is, by default) to make the Python modules less dependent on external libraries. We’re happy to have contributors helping out with the translation of Calamares into more languages than ever before.

This release contains contributions from (alphabetically by first name):

  • Adriaan de Groot
  • Alejo Fernandez
  • Anke Boersma
  • Christophe Marin
  • Emir Sari
  • Evan James
  • Gaël PORTAY
  • Gecko Linux
  • Jeremy Whiting
  • Neal Gompa

Core

  • Boost::Python is no longer a dependency, Calamares uses a bundled copy of pybind11 instead. This speeds up compilation and reducese the dependency tree a great deal. You can set WITH_PYBIND11=OFF in the build to keep Boost::Python and all the binary-compatibility problems it entails.
  • Coding style now wants clang-format 15 or 16, but no longer needs astyle. There is also a clang-tidy file for additional styling support.
  • Ongoing translation improvements. (thanks Emir)
  • Translations for bqi (Luri), es_AR (Castellano), eo (Esperanto), ka (Georgian). In non-release builds (e.g. between releases, so for developers building directly from git) all translations are enabled, even the ones with no translations at all.
  • The logging format in the session.log file and on-screen is now more similar, although the file contains a lot more per-line information.
  • The INSTALL_CONFIG option has been restored. It is still a terrible idea to fork the repository to modify the config files, and you probably should have a calamares-config package with those files instead, there are packaging workflows that can usefully patch-and- install configuration files. The option defaults to OFF.

Modules

  • All QML modules now have a Qt6-compatible set of QML files as well. (thanks Anke)
  • packagechooser supports AppStream 1.0 API.
  • unpackfs now uses the -S option to rsync for sparse file support. (thanks Jeremy)

TODO

All of the TODOs which I had planned for a 3.3.0 release are now done.

Feedback

If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker. For a full change list, see the full list of issues closed within the current generation (which is many releases).

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