After returning from the Chakra meeting I felt more motivated than ever, and we have many many ideas to put into practice. So let’s talk about what the Chakra developers are up to these days.

Akabei

Gallaecio has done awesome work improving the test coverage. He used GMock to stub out the external dependencies. This means you can build and run the tests without having the external dependencies (polkit, libarchive…) installed on your system. This also required a few architectural changes.

The next piece of work is getting rid of libarchive, the only C library used in akabei, in favour of KArchive. Gallaecio performed a benchmark to compare the performances, and we are satisfied KArchive is not going to cause a degradation. KArchive is the official KDE archiving library, which split out of kdelibs in 2013.

In the meantime, I keep testing akabei extensively. I found a bug in the replacement which caused an infinite loop. It turned out to be triggered by a very specific type of replacement; fixed now, and I took the opportunity to improve the user messages in case of “no update needed”. The next step in my list is a cleanup: I want to revisit the validation process and ensure infinite loops can never happen.

Calamares

I finished the work for the new users dialog; it’s now blocked on testing, which I had not have time to finish.

The new features I have added:

support for creating (and deleting) multiple users.

support for choosing the login shell; the list of available shells is part of the module configuration.

support for setting the avatar from file for KDE systems, which can be shut off.

All of this were feature requests on the Issue Tracker. Features I left aside for future versions:

setting avatars from URL too.

computing password strength.

Edit Oct 31, 2016

I tested the dialog on a newly-released Chakra Goedel, the new beta ISO. After a few bugfixes and some documentation, I created the pull request.

A preview of the module while testing in VirtualBox. Sorry, no fancy preview of Chakra :-) See full size image

Website

I am working on what I am calling the commit feeds. This is going to be a box or panel in the home page of the Chakra website, and it is going to show the latest commits from our repositories.

Given the upcoming switch, I am writing this for Gitlab directly.

Gitlab has a pretty extensive API to get information about projects and commits. Given this, I wondered if somebody had done a similar “module” before, but I could not find anything. Tips appreciated!

You can see the progress on the Gitlab repository.