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Releasing YaST separately?
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openSUSE 11.1 isn’t even out, but YaST is already getting some positive reviews over on OStatic. Imagine what kind of reviews YaST would get if it were released separately from openSUSE? Which brings me to the topic at hand… Stanislav Visnovsky is asking the question: Should YaST be released independently from openSUSE?
But in principle, YaST is a tool that can be used across distributions and there are people interested in this to happen. There are technical barriers to do releases independent of openSUSE (e.g. a lot of openSUSE-specific knowledge and behavior coded in YaST) as well as procedural. During past years, a lot of these non-technical issues has been addressed as we opened up the YaST development (re-licensing the code under GPL, opening up source control system and mailing lists, etc).
But still, there is one big thing left: YaST packages are released in concert with openSUSE. Yes, it is very convenient for openSUSE, but it makes it almost impossible to track the development during for people outside of our great distribution.
YaST is, for me, one of openSUSE’s major strengths, and I think it’d be beneficial for other distros and projects to use and extend.
Linux, after all these years, still lacks a good, comprehensive, and cross-distro system management tool that’s suitable for use at the console or from the desktop. (YaST qualifies as good and comprehensive, in my book, but falls down on the “cross-distro” part.)
I’d really like to see YaST development visible to the community at large as a separate process, for several reasons:
- Provide more attention to YaST releases — currently, YaST releases are announced concurrently with openSUSE releases and I don’t think they get the same attention they would separately.
- Provide more visibility into YaST development — which might help involve more projects with YaST.
- Assuming there’s more adoption of YaST outside of openSUSE, it would help provide additional testing and (presumably) improve YaST all around. Not that YaST isn’t perfect already, of course…
If you have thoughts around this, I’d encourage discussion over on Stano’s blog.
I run LUG with as part of a larger user group (about 7500 members) , I personally use OpenSuse since days before Novell most of the my sig members use Ubuntu and in my sitiuration it would be great to hav YaST on for debian as it is by far the best tool for configuration tool around.
Regards Terry Kemp
Committee Member of Melbpc User Group
Co-Convener
Linux & Open Source Sig
Thanks. If you’d like to help in the porting effort, I’m sure the YaST team would be happy to give guidance.
I am a general user (lay) of openSUSE. I don’t know what to think. I meet contradictions about Yast. From the side of experts I read great praise about Yast,
from the general users’ side is different:
in real life Linux is not much present - and openSUSE quite less –> Why? Because of Yast (and partitioning). Yast is difficult or complicated. [To manage repositories Debian-Ubuntu sort of distributions there is still more difficul.] What about the future?
Difficult, how? Because it’s different than equivalent tools for Windows, or because of some other reason.
Partitioning has always been a problem for Linux, because it’s just not intuitive — not saying that it’s non-intuitive in YaST, I’m saying in general. It’s hard for many users because they’ve never had to do it before — also, it’s just a wee bit scary, I’m sure, the first time you have to muck with partitioning.
Specific feedback would be welcome.
I would really really really love to see YaST come to every Linux distro out there. That would be such a boost for linux in general because YaST is something that hasn’t found it’s equivalent on any other distro imho. Maybe i’m saying this in the wrong place ;), but ubuntu is doing a great job nowadays and you here more and more people are using it (even “normal people”
) but it sure lacks a good (and now the most important word) CONSISTENT setup-tool which is holding people back to switch to linux, or even worse, sending them back to “the other” OS.
(oh please unleash te power of YaST upon the world!
)
Tools like system-config-printer from Fedora is being used by Ubuntu and Mandriva while nobody except SUSE uses Yast. You got to think why.
Please make yast have a parallel downloading system!