After a long pause, there are two new Calamares releases. Calamares is a Linux System Installer, and I was the maintainer for five years before resigning that role. Nobody has stepped up to take the role over, although Anke and Evan contribute regularly helping users and adding bits and pieces. So, I got some prodding to do new releases and did so.

Translation Updates

There is a 3.2.62 release, dating back to april 2023. That was the very last 3.2 series release, and just picked up translations from Transifex. After that, translations were switched to the 3.3 branch. Since there are no real 3.3 releases yet, there is little testing of the translation workflow yet.

Partway through the year Transifex dropped their older Python-based API client, so I needed to scramble (briefly) to get the new go-based one working. So now I’m packager on FreeBSD of a go program, huzzah. From a Calamares-development perspective not much has changed: translations always had automated updates through the txpull and txpush scripts.

Upcoming translations will apply only to the 3.3 series.

Extensions Updates

Sometimes forgotten, there is a calamares-extensions repo, which gets sort-of-regular updates from the PostmarketOS community because of the mobile module for configuring mobile phones with Linux.

There’s a 1.3.2 release, but upcoming 1.4 releases will require the Calamares 3.3 series as “host” of the extensions.

Calamares 3.3 (not yet)

I just released 3.3-alpha3. The next release will be 3.3.0, for reals. It has been a year since the last release from the calamares branch, and that’s just way too long. Release automation is there, so what I needed to do is do the same pre-release housekeeping as always, run the RELEASE.sh script, and enter my GPG passphrase.

Frankly, the GPG part was the hard part, because keys had expired in the meantime. I need to update my site and the Calamares site with updated GPG key fingerprints so that the releases can be properly verified.

There is a TODO list of sorts in the release announcement. Those are the things I feel like doing – more infrastructural, and not so much features for Linux distro’s. I guess if I don’t have to, I don’t install that many Linuxes in a day.

The takeaway is that there is still movement in the project, and releases are coming.