YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob | Hacker News Reader

YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob

opensuseadventures.blogspot.com

33 pointsjtanderson12 comments

    Largely this is due to the simple fact that SUSE has many proficient Ruby developers.

This strikes me as very pragmatic and doesn't surprise me. I had one of their developers as speakers (and martial arts instructor) at my conference (eurucamp[1]) and he was really good. He built some of their internal toolchain. Definitely someone I would trust to not pick an implementation base for its hype value.

[1]: http://2013.eurucamp.org/

Why would they create an scripting language just to develop YaST? The language feels very familiar though, check http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/id_ycp_func...

Here is the full reference. http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/Book-YCPLan...

Well, SuSE is german. And germans have an interesting case of NIH. For example, they invent scripting languages for their syslog deamons:

http://www.rainerscript.com/

That's kind of a racist comment and being German, I'm vaguely offended. However, I wouldn't fully disagree with you. This is almost the text book definition of NIH: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering

In his defense, systemd does solve some fundamental problems with sysV-style init. Incrementally improving the disparate sysV init systems to be more concurrent and robust would likely have benefitted the community less, and at the end of the day it still would not have looked like the familiar init system sysV users are used to.

Just so you know: I am german as well. Also, the comment is not racist.

The big win that YaST brings is a common configuration and management interface across multiple UIs. Back when I used OpenSUSE, I had LXDE, KDE, and headless/CLI boxes which could all be administered using roughly the same interface.

The big fail, though, is that most of the development effort goes into YaST, making it sort of awkward to script these things or change them manually using the CLI. It wasn't until switching to Arch Linux that I really felt like I understood how to configure my system without pointing and clicking.

Does this mean they need to ship an additional scripting runtime?

I think OpenSUSE already ships with ruby by default, but I'm not 100% sure. (SUSE tends to be everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. It's certainly not a minimalist distro.) It certainly means it would now be required on even the most minimal SUSE installs, though.

What are they using for the GUI? That has always been a bit of a ruby weakpoint.

Also packaging into executables

I would assume that they will be continuing with Qt, Gtk and the web frontend.

In my (limited) experience, GUI development in Ruby is only a weak point if you want to retain portability. If you're just targeting one Linux distro, it's less of an issue.

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