One of the advantages for open source is that there are many opportunities for code-reuse — one of the tragedies of open source is that code-reuse doesn’t happen as often as it could, for a number of reasons. I’m always happy to see when something developed for one project — like YaST — can be used to benefit other projects that aren’t directly related to the main project.

That’s a long-winded intro for the news that the YaST team has separated its user interface library from the rest of the YaST infrastructure, so that other applications can take advantage of the UI library:

The YaST UI library provides a very simple API to build rather complex but still consistent user interfaces. The particular implementation of the interface depends on the chosen backend - Qt, Gtk+ or ncurses. The primary target for this library is YaST, Yet Another Setup Tool developed for installation and configuration of SUSE products.

However, the library was very deeply tight to the rest of YaST infrastructure which made it nearly impossible to use it outside of YaST. Not anymore. Very soon, there will be packages available in openSUSE that provide the library independently of YaST, so any application that might need to provide both graphical as well as textual interface can easily do so. They provide also examples how to use the library from pure C++.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes open source so damn awesome. With any luck, we’ll be seeing all sorts of applications taking advantage of this YaSTy goodness, and saving time by not having to re-invent the wheel.

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