All 2 entries tagged Yast

Nicer YaST progress reporting.

I was prompted by a bug report to look at the progress reporting employed by YaST whenever the package management is used. At present separate popup windows are used to indicate progress/activity for reading each repository cache, and any downloads etc.

This makes the UI look rather busy & distracting. It also can cause problems for people using some window managers which fail at stopping the progress dialogues from stealing focus. This behaviour is one of the most frequent complaints now.

Additionally there is no global progress indication, which means people have no real idea how long the operation will take to complete. And for people on dialup it could be fairly slow.

I had a poke to see how difficult it would be to embed the progress reporting into the main window, and show global progress. It turned out to be relatively easy.

• Little video
• Screenshot (Qt)
• Screenshot (ncurses)

I’ll upload the source when I’ve refined the design a bit and make it work alongside the existing progress callbacks to avoid breaking everything else currently using them.

: 31 Oct 2007 23:48 |  Tags: Opensuse Yast |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

YCP syntax highlighting for kate

Most people see YaST [0] as an application used for configuring the operating system. Relatively few people know that it is a development platform with its own language, libraries, and user interface abstraction layer that enables the developer to write a configuration module that will display using Qt when run in KDE, GTK when run in GNOME, ncurses when run on the command line. [1]

Although there are very nice features of the YaST platform, there are also disadvantages. YCP (The language most [2] YaST modules are written in is quite archaic in some respects, and there is limited library support. Also as YCP is only used by YaST there is little tool support for developing in it. In an effort to make developing in YCP a little easier for the remainder of its lifetime I wrote some kate-part (Used by kwrite,kate,kdevelop,konqueror etc) syntax highlighting rules for the YCP language. Screenshots: Here -> and here .

To use them simply save http://bw.uwcs.co.uk/kateycp/ycp.xml in ~/.kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax or `kde-config—prefix`/share/apps/katepart/syntax for all users.

It should be possible to create some kdevelop templates for YaST projects, and possibly even a tool for automatically generating the framework for common modules such as wizards.

[0] http://en.opensuse.org/YaST

[1] http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SL10.2/tdg/id_big_architecture.html

[2] Yes modules can be written in Perl too, and now Ruby. At present the user interface components must be written using YCP though. Also I personally dislike Perl and Ruby more than YCP.

: 28 Jul 2007 19:28 |  Tags: Suse Yast |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem