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It's been a little while since a new version of kalu - upgrade notifier for Arch Linux - has been released. But version 1.4.0 is here, and with it comes a bunch a bugfixes, as well as a couple of new features.

Put kalu on pause

Pretty much since forever, you could set in kalu a "skip period," i.e. a period of time during which kalu would not run its automatic tests. Especially useful for people keeping their computer on 24/7 yet having to sleep regularly.

From now on kalu introduces a pause feature, allowing you to basically do the same, but whenever you want: you can pause kalu.

The "skip period" (or "paused period") defined in Preferences now simply switches kalu's paused state. Upon start, kalu checks whether we're during the skip period or not, and simply either auto-pauses or auto-resumes (i.e. triggers auto-checks).

When kalu is paused, its icon will give a visual feedback, automatic checks will not be ran anymore until it is resumed, either manually or through this "skip period" (or "paused period").

Additionally, you can now define a different set of actions to be done (including toggling its paused stated) on single/double-click on kalu's icon, depending on whether it is paused or not.

kalu can speak your language; knows French

As announced a little while ago, kalu can now talk different languages, all it needs is a translation.

And version 1.4.0 of kalu is already available in French, thanks to kolibry. And if you want to translate it to your own language, just refer to the post above for the how-to and send me the .po file!

What's else is new?

• Preferences: Fix double click action empty on re-show last notifications

  When action show last notifs was used on dbl-click, showing preferences would not select it in the list, and could therefore have it lost upon saving.

• Add config tweak to not show notifications on auto-checks

  Adding AutoNotifs = 0 to kalu.conf will disable showing notifications during automatic checks. They can be shown using "re-show last notifications" as usual. (Notifications will still be shown for manual checks.)

• AUR: Fix package names not being urlencoded

  Package names were used as-is in the URLs for the AUR, which could lead to unexpected results (likely segfault) when said names contained "special" characters, e.g. the plus sign.

• AUR: Avoid segfault in case of unexpected results

  If a package returned by the AUR wasn't on the list asked for (which could happen when names weren't urlencoded, and both foo and foo+ were packages existing in the AUR) kalu would segfault.

  We now ensure the package was found, and if not trigger an error.

• AUR: Fix possible memory leak on invalid JSON

• kalu-updater: Fix question to skip package not being asked

  Question to skip upgrading a package when dependencies cannot be resolved was not asked, leading to kalu (and kalu-dbus) hanging, needing to be killed.

• Fix empty notifications when '&' was used in text

  Seems that because it uses a subset of HTML, the text in notifications should not use '&' directly, but encode it as & (else, the text of notification is just empty, at least with notification-daemon and xfce4-notifyd)

  So, when creating new notifications, we make sure to "convert" those '&' since there can be some in e.g. a package description, which could be used as part of the template (text is untouched on CLI output).

• Fix hanging on error parsing config

  When error occured parsing configuration, since 13c4ffb4 GTK init wasn't yet done, error messages couldn't be shown and kalu would just hang.

• Fix Makefile.am to handle spaces (in {dist,install-data}-hook)

• Help: Add info about conf files structure, and a section about config tweaks

  Describe the format of the different conf files used by kalu, as well as the name and supported values of each settings.

• kalu will now use the installed kalu.png file as its logo. It'll be used about everywhere (systray, windows, menus...)

Download and whatnot

You'll find all download links and information right there.

Many thanks to all those who contributed/reported bugs or suggested features. And as always, new bug reports, suggestions or any other form of constructive criticism is very much welcome.