Calamares Late Summer
Aug 25, 2020
COVID-19 continues to hold much of the world in its grip, while Calamares development continues inside. In previous years there has been a “Calamares Summer Plan” so let’s continue with that in spite of everything.
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For the past 15 releases or more, Calamares has tried to do “short-cycle” releases: perhaps every other week, although that often stretched out to a month as landing-things and finishing-things is harder than it looks. This model of short-cycle releases is set to continue for the foreseeable future.
The short-cycle release model also brings “things land when they land” with it: features get worked on, at varying speeds, and are merged to the calamares branch when they are ready.
- Recent releases were a very mixed bag, so there’s been a lot more testing added recently to try to avoid that. Integration testing, by the distro’s that use Calamares, remains essential though. I’d like to particularly thank KaOS, Manjaro and neon for their bug reports.
- Most recently we’ve had a lot of internal changes that aren’t immediately visible for the end-user: configuration files have been cleaned up, new configuration options added, and the licensing of the whole codebase has been checked.
- Upcoming releases will continue the work on QML modules, thanks to KaOS, and user-interface improvements requested by various downstream distro’s.
- New translations continue to come in, with Telugu now on the roster.
- Tidying up partitioning remains a big issue, as does rootless operation (which is also necessary for better accessibility).
Overall, the plan is “steady as she goes” for the next quarter, with the possibility of source-incompatible Calamares 3.3 branch slowly growing.