

YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob - jtanderson
http://opensuseadventures.blogspot.com/2013/06/yast-is-being-rewritten-in-ruby-geeko.html

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Argorak

        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/>

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thepumpkin1979
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...](http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/id_ycp_function.html)

Here is the full reference.
[http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/Book-
YCPLan...](http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/Book-
YCPLanguage.html)

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Argorak
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/>

~~~
SEJeff
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>

~~~
nathanb
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.

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nathanb
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.

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

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jofer
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.

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

Also packaging into executables

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

