Calamares does not use xz directly, and Calamares isn’t sshd, so the attack against xz does not affect Calamares directly. It is worthwhile, though, to reflect on how Calamares development and releases happen, and what we can learn from the attack against xz.
What is Calamares
Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. Calamares aims to be easy, usable & beautiful while remaining independent of any particular Linux distribution.
Knowledge Base
The Guide linked above has documentation for end-users, the wiki is mostly for distro developers. The developer’s guide contains information on building Calamares, on its design, and localization.
Calamares look
Since Calamares is designed to be customized, themed and branded by individual distributions, it can look very different when used by specific distributions. A separate extensions package contains examples and custom modules.
Latest News:
Calamares and xz
Calamares 3.3.5 released
A little release with a handful of Qt6-related improvements, a bugfix for NetPlan, and a new feature in the displaymanager module.
Calamares 3.3 series ABI compatibility
A long-standing wish of mine is to reach some kind of ABI stability in the Calamares core. Over the lifetime of the 3.2 series, methods were added and removed, namespaces shuffled around, and data members littered all over. This has a major downside for (third-party) C++ modules that need to be recompiled for each Calamares release. The 3.3 series aims to improve the situation.