Hi,

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. The main goals are to give the platform a technology boost, so that we can evolve it easier in the future, and lower the effort spent on maintenance in the long term.

The project recently reached an important milestone -- we are able to install a 12.3-based system using an installer composed only of translated YaST modules:

http://lists.opensuse.org/yast-devel/2013-05/msg00026.html

We would like to integrate that work Factory/openSUSE 13.1 soon. Technically the integration mainly means that we would do a final switch of the language to Ruby in YaST's Git repository and submit updated packages into Factory.

We think we will be able to do this in time for M4. We'd also like to use M2 and M3 as test-beds and produce our own versions of the images (meaning we'll take exactly the same packages as in M2/M3, replace the YaST ones with Ruby version, and build the image in the same way as official images). We'd also like to use the openQA infrastructure to test our images extensively. We think that with this approach we'll be well-prepared for the final integration and we'll minimize the number of bugs and regressions.

For more details about the plan and reasoning behind it, see my e-mail on yast-devel:

http://lists.opensuse.org/yast-devel/2013-05/msg00035.html

Since this is a big change, I thought it would be good to announce it here. If anyone has any questions or objections, please let me know so we can discuss them and possibly adapt the plan. Thanks.