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.

I’m not a good mentor-as-a-side-gig. I know that now. I shouldn’t mix mentoring with other activities – like coding full-time and being on the board of KDE e.V. and doing FreeBSD things too – so this is the last one for me until circumstances change.

But for Anubhav Choudhary I hope this isn’t the last he participates in KDE things, in Open Source things, in C++ and Python and community activities. Mostly I’ll point 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.

There’s two tangible results, where I’ll just point at the relevant configuration items. We worked on these together, with plenty of review time and code improvements as things 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!).