On 6/3/2013 11:30 AM, Josef Reidinger wrote:
On Mon, 3 Jun 2013 17:16:49 +0200 (CEST) Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@inai.de> wrote:
On Monday 2013-06-03 16:38, Duncan Mac-Vicar P. wrote:
On 31/05/13 17:57, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Friday 2013-05-31 10:03, David Majda wrote:
as some may know, since January few SUSE developers in Prague are working on automatically translating YaST codebase from YCP (an old proprietary language) into Ruby. [...] For more details about the plan and reasoning behind it, see my e-mail on yast-devel:
Why exactly Ruby? (No info was found on that within the message and the one linked to in it.)
It satisfies that is a popular scripting language with a decent community and tools around it, and it happens at the same time that people working with YaST and other projects around SUSE and openSUSE are very proficient with it.
Probably python would have been another option. Lot of developers are also very proficient with it, but it would not make a big difference.
Well I am "worried" because it means introducing more dependencies into a standard system. Up to now, I was able to keep ruby out, because nothing serious depended on it.
Well, more dependencies is questionable as code is already there, just it is C implementation of ruby, but C++ implementation of YCP. Of course YCP implementation is much simplistic so it is smaller, but it also means, that there is more code in ycp that provide basic functionality that is already in ruby. So my hope is that we just replace one dependency by another. But to be honest to you, it won't happen in 13.1 as there is still small parts that use ycp code as data format and we kept it there to not break anything. Plan is to remove it in next steps.
To summary it, I think that dependencies for people not using any ruby is just switched and for people using something written in ruby will be decreased.
Well, not exactly. If yast depends on ruby, then the user is not free to install the ruby of their choice, ie upgrades, source install, security addons, performance/caching add-ons. They would either have to lock their version of ruby to whatever yast needs, or maintain 2 ruby installs one just for yast (and hope yast can even be told to use it), or risk breaking yast. Systems run a lot longer than suse supports them. So after a very few months, suse is no longer updating yast on that version of suse, but the user is still using the system and probably wants to update ruby. I am all for this change because maintaining custom dead end proprietary stuff that has been surpassed elsewhere for "free" doesn't do any of us any good. And although I don't use ruby either, the arguments for using it make good enough sense. By all means, proceed! Just please be aware that there are complications. They can be worked around a few different ways if you are thinking of them early and throughout, instead of everyone is surprised after it's too late to help. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org