Calamares 1.0 Distribution-Independent Installer Framework Released

[teo_m]

It's just an installer framework. Used only during installation and it can install Qt and GTK based desktops equally fine. No need for the outdated KDE vs Gnome purism wars here.

Calamares founder/project manager/lead developer/etc here. Thank you everyone for the amazing feedback!
I just wish to point out a few things which might have been unclear in the original announcement.

Firstly, Calamares itself is a pure Qt application, not a KF5 application. The only KF5 bits are those required by the partitioning module, since it uses KDE PartitionManager code. While I would personally be happy if Calamares became the "usual installer" on KDE-oriented distributions, Calamares is not a KDE project, and we try to support and cater to all environments. I'm a KDE user and a member of the KDE community (I've been hacking on KDE projects for years now), but if Calamares doesn't look or work right in a GTK-based environment, I would consider that a bug and try to fix it.

Secondly, I find it really weird when someone says a software is "bloated", because "bloat", whatever that might actually be, needs to be measured against what the software does. I try to keep our dependencies to a minimum, but I also need to meet a specific set of requirements, and I make hard choices on which tools to use to accomplish that. For a versatile, modular and brandable installer framework, Qt + yaml-cpp + Python + Boost.Python + a small part of KF5 (limited to a single module) doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Installers with different feature sets will require different sets of dependencies, and I'm sure some distributions will have their requirements met much better by some other installer.