Another month passed, just like that. I spent last week holed up with some KDE people in the hills, watching the snow come down. While they did impressive things to the KDE codebase, I hacked on Calamares. Since my last post on the topic, I've been running a roughly every-other-week release schedule for the Calamares 3.1-stable branch. We've just reached 3.1.10. The reason for these stable releases is small bugfixes, minor polishing, and occasional non-interfering features.

Each release is announced on the Calamares site, and can be found on the Calamares GitHub page.

Calamares isn't a KDE project, and aims to support whatever Linux distro wants to use it, and to configure the stuff that is needed for that distro. But when feature requests show up for KDE integration, there's no special reason for me to reject them -- as long as things can remain modular, the SKIP_MODULES mechanism in Calamares can avoid unwanted KDE Frameworks dependencies.

One new module in development is called "Plasma Look-and-Feel" (plasmalnf) and the purpose there is to configure the look-and-feel of Plasma. No surprise there, but ther point is that this can be done during installation, before Plasma is started by the (new) user on the target system. So kind of like the Look-and-Feel KCM, but entirely outside of the target environment. The UI is more primitive, more limited, but that's the use-case that was asked for. I'd like to thank the Plasma developers for helping out with tooling and guiding me through some of the Plasma code, and deployers of Calamares (that is, distro's) can look forward to this feature in the 3.2 series.

Speaking of Calamares 3.2, I'm intending to put out an RC fairly soon, with the features as developed so far. There will probably be a few RCs each of which integrates a new feature branch (e.g. a giant requirements-checking rewrite) with 3.2.0 showing up for real in the new year.