Season of KDE: Anubhav Choudhary

Apr 19, 2021

This season – january to april, so that’s winter-and-early-spring season for me but probably other seasons elsewhere in the world – Calamares participated in Season of KDE, which is a participate-in-KDE activity. While Calamares is not a KDE project, there is enough KDE code used by Calamares to call it KDE-adjacent, and so we tagged along.

Anubhav Choudhary participated in various improvements of Calamares. Details can be found at getting started and wrapping up. Getting started in college while also participating in a software project in partly-familiar language with people several timezones away over low-bandwidth communications is an achievement in its own right, regardless of what was actually built. But there are tangible results, where the visible surface (the links go to configuration files and documentation) is a lot smaller than what really went on:

  • Configurable pastebin: if installation fails with Calamares, it can be a considerable job to find the log file and upload it somewhere. This makes debugging difficult for distro’s, and eventually, difficult for me too. The user is now prompted if they want to upload. Distro’s can customize the configuration to point to a private fiche server for that distro. The code is prepared for more pastebins.
  • Next/prev visibility: there’s this long phase during installation of partitioning, writing stuff to disk, configuring the target .. during that phase, the navigation buttons next (you can’t use that until it’s done!) and back (to before installation started!?) serve no purpose. They can now be hidden while they are useless. This configuration can be used in all UI forms (widgets and QML) for Calamares.

Thanks Anubhav for participating (and keep in touch!).

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