Welcome to Calamares! We're happy that you would like to add something to Calamares. This contribution guide should help you get started. The guide is not exhaustive: most of it points to other documents that you will need.
The Calamares community -- of developers, translators, and downstream (distro) users -- aims to be courteous, professional, and inclusive. Harrassment, discriminatory statements and abuse are not tolerated. In general, we apply the KDE Code of Conduct and the GNOME Code of Conduct (the rules of decent behavior in both communities are pretty much the same).
See the CoC section on the wiki for a longer text. To report a problem, please contact the maintainer, Adriaan de Groot, or the KDE Community Working Group.
GitHub Issues are one place for discussing Calamares if there are concrete problems or a new feature to discuss.
Regular Calamares development chit-chat happens in a Matrix
room, #calamares:kde.org. The conversation is bridged with IRC
on Libera.Chat.
Responsiveness is best during the day
in Europe, but feel free to idle. If you use IRC, DO NOT ask-and-leave. Keep
that chat window open because it can easily take a few hours for
someone to notice a message.
Matrix is persistent, and we'll see your message eventually.
Pull Requests are welcome!
It is often a good idea to start a Pull Request early, with just work-in-progress, so that the overall approach can be discussed before you put a lot of work into something. Or file an issue describing what you would like to do.
If you are writing code, stick to the existing coding style and apply the coding-style tool before you commit. It's not my favorite style, but at least all of Calamares is consistent and the tool helps it stay that way.
If you are writing documentation, use en_US spelling.
If you are doing cool stuff, let us know (on IRC or through issues).
Do fork Calamares to try new things, don't keep your fork to yourself, do upstream things as much as you can. When you make cool new things, it's best for the whole Calamares-using-community to build new things that are configurable and applicable to other distributions than your own. So keep other folk in mind. There is also the extensions repository for somewhat-more-specialized modules and examples.
Up to date building-Calamares instructions are on the wiki.
Main:
- Compiler with C++17 support: GCC >= 7 or Clang >= 5
- CMake >= 3.3
- Qt >= 5.9
- yaml-cpp >= 0.5.1
- Python >= 3.3 (required for some modules)
- Boost.Python >= 1.55.0 (required for some modules)
- KDE extra-cmake-modules >= 5.18 (recommended; required for some modules; required for some tests)
- KDE Frameworks KCoreAddons (>= 5.58 recommended)
- PythonQt (optional, deprecated)
Individual modules may have their own requirements; these are listed in CMake output. Particular requirements (not complete):
- fsresizer KPMCore >= 3.3 (>= 4.2 recommended)
- partition KPMCore >= 3.3 (>= 4.2 recommended)
- users LibPWQuality (optional)
Deployment instructions are on the wiki.
Calamares translations are done on Transifex. The translator's guide on the wiki explains how to get involved there.
There is a testing guide on the wiki. It is possible to test most parts of Calamares in isolation, but the real proof of the pudding comes with an actual installation of some distro using Calamares.
The UI components should get some specific usability testing instructions soon.