New words surface in linux, buzz buzz; and then sometimes they disappear. But when I see the same word three times in a day, irc, forum1 forum2, well, maybe it is worth looking into.
The site. https://calamares.io/about/
https://github.com/calamares
From some other people breaking ground for years with Debian - their view on the worth of calamares
https://news.siduction.org/2017/02/next-release-plans/
It still needs lvm support however. But with sufficient love, I believe lvm support will be realized.
aptitude show partitionmanager - seems the depends of the parent is not huge, and will hopefully be smaller than it's parent.
IMHO, it looks to be a blessing to not only smaller distributions (distros) but also for smaller Desktop Environments (DE's) peace out.
Looks interesting, and if it works out well, it will save both time and resources better spent on other dev things. :)
A tale of two installs.
I had problems with the first install of an iso via calamares 3.1. As for years is set up the usb key via "dd". It borked - failed after hitting enter on the "install via usb" line (different distro). It kept complaining about unable to get the squashfs from sdb. I tried, I tried, md5 would not list on the usb key on a stable machine. However redoing the usb key via "cp iso /dev/sdx" and "sync" worked. I did not try to set it up on a lvm base. The standard easy install put everything (except swap) in one partition. All in all pretty easy, but not set up the way I would like.
And then I tried with the 4.7 Sparky. The other distro had a "Calamares" icon on the upper left. Sparky had no icon, but the menu with standard install went to a calamares install. And it went smooth. If anyone has any success at installing onto a pre-existing lvm partition system, please mention it. I will try that later this week.
The moral, Calamares looks and performs quite similarly for different distros. And I believe I will transition away from "dd if=blah.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=512k" to the "cp" method. Can't wait until it handles lvm