3 ms·

YaST is being rewritten in Ruby; Geeko gets a nosejob

33 points by jtanderson 13y ago

thepumpkin1979 13y ago
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_function.html 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-YCPLanguage.html http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/Book-YCPLan...
- Argorak 13y ago
  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/ http://www.rainerscript.com/
  - SEJeff 13y ago
    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 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
    - nathanb 13y ago
      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.
    - Argorak 13y ago
      Just so you know: I am german as well. Also, the comment is not racist.
Argorak 13y ago
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/ http://2013.eurucamp.org/
rurounijones 13y ago
What are they using for the GUI? That has always been a bit of a ruby weakpoint. Also packaging into executables
- Rovanion 13y ago
  I would assume that they will be continuing with Qt, Gtk and the web frontend.
- nathanb 13y ago
  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.
mixmastamyk 13y ago
Does this mean they need to ship an additional scripting runtime?
- jofer 13y ago
  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.
nathanb 13y ago
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.
zomzom 13y ago
Ruby? Ewwww .. might as well use VB

33 points by jtanderson 13y ago

thepumpkin1979 13y ago

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_function.html 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-YCPLanguage.html http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/SLES10/tdg/Book-YCPLan...

Argorak 13y ago
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/ http://www.rainerscript.com/
- SEJeff 13y ago
  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 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
  - nathanb 13y ago
    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.
  - Argorak 13y ago
    Just so you know: I am german as well. Also, the comment is not racist.

Argorak 13y ago

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/ http://2013.eurucamp.org/

rurounijones 13y ago

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

Rovanion 13y ago
I would assume that they will be continuing with Qt, Gtk and the web frontend.
nathanb 13y ago
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.

mixmastamyk 13y ago

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

jofer 13y ago
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.

nathanb 13y ago

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.

zomzom 13y ago

Ruby? Ewwww .. might as well use VB