OpenSUSE 13.1 Switching To Ruby-Based YaST

[Awesomeness]

It seems odd that the distro that is pretty much "the kde distro" is using Ruby to rewrite its control center in. I'd figure PySide or just actual C++ Qt (just without the KDE dependencies for their other DE spins) would have made more sense.

YaST is written in C++. See https://github.com/yast/yast-core/tree/master/liby2/src
In addition to C++ code YaST also has a scripting engine. The home-grown scripting engine is being replaced with Ruby. That's all.

[LinuxID10T]

I just read the article and was left at, "OH GOD, WHY?!?"

[GreatEmerald]

Interesting. That should make things easier to manage, I suppose.

I wonder if it will have themeing that matches the rest of the DE now, though.

The theming is due to special YaST theming packages. If you remove them, or just move the /usr/share/YaST2/theme/current symlink somewhere else, it will use the system styles (the root ones, which you can configure by doing a kdesu systemsettings if on KDE).

opensuse doesn't want to be known as the "kde distro" because they feel it's too exclusive. I personally think they should play to their strength and embrace it.

Half of the people on openSUSE use KDE. The other half uses GNOME. Roughly speaking, that is (always bound to be XFCE, E17, etc. users as well).

I run 12.3 on some family PCs and it doesn't obey Qt theming or styling, so I'm pretty sure its not Qt based (yet, at least).

It is Qt-based. Or GTK-based. Or ncurses-based. You can install either of the three packages, or all of them, and then choose one through the /etc/sysconfig editor.

A) YaST runs as root, so is would pick up whatever styles root has set.

I really hope it stops running as root in the future: https://features.opensuse.org/314778

[Awesomeness]

I really hope it stops running as root in the future: https://features.opensuse.org/314778

Maybe with the Ruby engine this will be easier to implement.

[HeavensRevenge]

If they want a scripting language they should just do JavaScript... WAY faster than Ruby these days but a little less sane from the prototypical inheritance etc, a bit easier to read since its C-Style syntax, and I'd say millions more devs can use JS good or bad.
But even if they didn't want to use V8 to run YaST most desktop environments use JS scripting features built-in already for extensions & applet functionality so integration to YaST could be tighter to the desktop for notifications etc.
At least they went with Ruby and not Python :P

[GreatEmerald]

Maybe with the Ruby engine this will be easier to implement.

Possibly. The plugins would have to support polkit as well, and it probably is easier to do so when using Ruby.

[Gps4l]

That's a shame, because everyone still(and will) refer to them as the "kde distro".

I wonder if these people ever have installed openSUSE in the last few years.

Since the first time I installed openSUSE, which was version 9.0, I was greeted with a screen, were I can pick kde or gnome.

[speculatrix]

Anyway, I hope the rewrite makes yast faster. It was a nice tool, but too slow for my liking when I last tried suse

I don't have much experience with ruby, but my daily encounter with Puppet makes me automatically assume everything will run very slowly and require 150MB of ram to do the most trivial things.

[fuzz]

Strange, I'd think they'd want to go with Python...