The Calamares project keeps chugging along. It is ready for the KDE Megarelease – at least in the sense of “ready for Qt6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Plasma 6” in so far as distro’s are going to be making ISO’s with that environment. KaOS has such a thing, and is a primary driver for Calamares Qt6 compatibility. There’s been a bunch of releases recently, with somewhat dry release notes on the Calamares website. Here’s some possibly-more-colorful background.

Release Cadence

Calamares is a community-maintained project. There’s three maintainers – Anke, Evan and myself – putting effort into it, when possible. I’ve got in mind to do one release a month, or maybe every other month. A lot depends on available time and whether anything interesting lands in a given period.

  • Calamares 3.3.0 was released after a year’s drought on December 12th, 2023. The difference with the 3.2 series is considerable, and under-documented. There is (community!) work underway to improve that situation.
  • Calamares 3.3.1 was released January 15th, 2024. This had more CI work done. The calamares-extensions repository – third-party extension modules for Calamares – is now built once a week along with Calamares, to ensure compatibility is maintained.
  • Calamares 3.3.2 was released February 19th, 2024. I spent a whole day on German ICE trains coming back from vacation. That gave me enough time to implement some stuff and merge in code from a bunch of new-or-returning contributors.
  • Calamares 3.3.3 was five days later, as we found a peculiar issue present in debug builds (but not in release builds). Mixing QObject::connect and lambdas and UniqueConnection was triggering a Qt assert at runtime. I worked around that (lambdas were unnecessary here, if I introduced “plain” methods for the code). Meanwhile Anke improved the KDE Plasma 6 situation with ports of some modules that were previously KDE-Frameworks-5-only.
  • Calamares 3.3.4 was today. I got a carefully-written bug report on Matrix from Fedora folks (thanks Neal) about some build errors in their configuration. Since I have Fedora-based CI this was easy to reproduce, and then harder to fix. In the meantime there were some feature requests from the Ubuntu family which were started on the train, and finished on my couch while waiting for dinner.

I just spotted a new issue reported by KDE Neon, so maybe there will be a 3.3.5 Real Soon as well. Calamares development feels like fun right now, so who knows, this weekend (while waiting for planned cinnamon rolls to bake) it might happen.