Hello everybody, nice to see you again, thanks for being interested about Yast. I can introduce myself, my name is Duncan Magdica, I work for SUSE as a team lead

for the Yast team in Nuremberg. We are in charge of all the installation, configuration modules and also quite a lot of base libraries for the system. What I want to share with you today is mostly what are we working on right now. Last year we

did also a presentation here and I share with you mostly the improvements we did across the distributions. We are going to do a quick review of those in case you were not here last year and then I will show you what we are working on and

let's see if you can get excited to also help us. So the talk is mostly three parts. I think you can ignore the timings there because I'm really bad with timing so I'm pretty sure it won't work. I'm going to talk about where are we now, what were the latest improvements in the development and

then later show what are the challenges and opportunities we have and what are we doing about that. And then I will do a small demo about one small technology we plan to release I hope in the next version at

least as a preview or first early version. So where is Yast right now? It's difficult to define Yast because it's a program, it's also a development environment, it's also knowledge and it's tied to almost every part of the

distribution. But today you have basically an environment where you can configure the system in almost any area. Not all the modules are known by the people because quite a lot of them are shipped only for example for SLES.

While they are still open source and they are still in our repository, not much users cares about them. The areas we have include file sharing, we can talk exactly about a problem about for example these modules. We have quite

advanced partitioning that means we are able to partition the system on installation and also we provide a tool to do quite advanced partitioning with LVM cryptographic. You can basically build your own stack of storage with it. We have of course really really important one of the most used tasks

software management. All the modules are integrated between them and that's what makes different the approach SUSE has for configuration to what for example Fedora is doing. I was just in a talk about the August project and they want to expose this service for configuration but they are exposing the

configuration files to the applications. That means you get the knowledge among all applications and that's the knowledge just captured. For the web server module will be called you will be asked to if you don't have the Apache installed it will talk with the software module to actually get the

package there first and once the Apache is configured it will talk with the security the firewall module to open the port so you make sure that the port 80 is open. So and that's quite important in Linux we can't see configuration as just let's open this configuration file and let's change a value because that usually doesn't work. A part of that we have support to

configure hardware this is actually becoming less important because in the latest time it's like a commodity almost everything worked out of the box things like pretty configuration is almost also not much needed anymore but there are stuff that needs also knowledge from different parts for example if you want to configure your fingerprint scanner then yeah you need

to set up the desktop environment so it actually uses the password for something with a fingerprint scanner. And we also got a new module this is new in the last release we added a nice overview of all the security so you don't need to know be a security expert just can tell you more or less

how secure is your system and what settings you can change. So that's where we are now. Here I put a special part of help why this does important because we maintain so many modules a lot of module doesn't have much audience but they are for specific customers that need some solution. In the case of Herbit we are we need more people involved with the use cases

because some people complain that is not very complete but we don't have actually the knowledge to say what kind of features the people using Herbit needs. So that's a nice project if you're interested in clustering and monitoring. So what are the things we accomplished last year? We completed some magazine events that we we are like the most sexy installation and

stuff like that and actually if you use Windows 7 installation we are still pretty also. The nice thing here is that we are not pretty by default but you can if you are building appliances for example you can see SUSE studio. SUSE is going in a direction where you can build your own distribution and we make also easy that if you want to set up your own

branding here in installation is quite easy to do. This is based on CSS QT 4 so it's quite standard statute you don't need to be a developer to change this. We got a little bit simpler that means if you look at the

installation this is the code 10 or the 10 series installation steps to get this version installed and this is how the 11 looks like. It was accomplished by different ways like mixing a lot of screens in one screen like you don't want to screen just to agree the license and

then to select where you are and then to select what's your language you can just ask those in one screen but also a lot of the functionality was moved to the desktop like registering to get an update repository was really not something you can discuss if it's better to do the installation but we wanted to or goal was to get simple installation so we move everything to

the runtime. The first time you're logging into the desktop the distribution will ask you hey if you want updates please click here open your browser and get just open and register your system. Also other things like well small was not there but small was also moved to the desktop too if

you want to submit your hardware so to contribute to the small community the first time you log in it will ask if you want to contribute to the small community and send your hardware profile which is quite important too for business actually to prioritize which drivers should we invest in. We also got

simpler not only by the installation but also doing modules that get permanently reviewed like I think the most important case was the partitioner also some other modules are being continuously by usability people reviewed and and doing drastic redesigns. In the case of the partitioner people liked the new redesign I think because the old one

was not very not much loved. Still we are not in the perfect there are a lot of complaints about some small details but much more progress as the first one and we got fast. Our worst nightmare from Code 10 was about speed and then

we got fast and and I think 11.1 was a stage of maturity of the package management we were fast already was nice to use and that allows us to focus not in basic things but on different stations and that's the stage where we are now. In 11.1 we introduced a little bit of new infrastructure we were not

able to finish all the final features actually present them to the user but it was we're going to release less 10 is less 11 we had to put all the infrastructure for product management other management and decide those things before. So for OpenSUSE it's not that critical infrastructure is there and now for 11.2 we want to actually introduce some value in

there. The SAT solver also was mentioned at the talk is not only used by LIFSIP now but it's also used in SUSE studio so you SUSE studio has like a real-time rest server that does dependency resolution actually there was a kind of fedora was also trying to do a project in the same

direction called razor but it's really really underground because they also have this political problem that yam is official one so they have some project externally but they are I haven't seen much activity there it will be nice if they also will leverage this project. As you can see the

difference in some things like memory usage we are continue much better. I don't put Debian here to compare because Debian is a completely different use case they they do dependency resolution in a completely different way they depend only in packages they don't depend on binary libraries for example so if a package breaks the libraries it provides in Debian it will

just break why and that's the difference the problem you're solving is Debian is solving thousands of dependencies while we are solving millions that's why it's better to compare with other RPMs solutions that are basically solving the same problem and we are integrated. Yes it's not a program but it's actually a

citizen of the distribution. We are present from the moment you take a CD you use yas to install the distribution in your computer and from there you can create a profile to clone the installation and use a normal web

server and use auto-yas to define profiles for every department or every son of your company and automatically install this distribution in computers but even if you don't want to get the computer completely installed and you would like people in not laptops for example to personalize some aspect of

the auto installation you can also use first boot to allow them in the first boot to set up more things. OpenSUSE has made enormous progress with for example the build service now SUSE studio also providing repositories and we also integrate somehow in this chain because novel customer center provides

supported updates for enterprise products we have now novel S&T which is novel customer center as a proxy you can use inside your enterprise is also GPL it's not packaged in OpenSUSE I think but this GPL code also. And we allow with the yas product creator also to take repositories from OpenSUSE defined

products and get the updates back to the enterprise. So we are not a program we are in every place and that's the complexity. So what are the challenge opportunities we have? Let me synchronize myself with my okay so there is

three kind of challenge one was we are introducing a lot of functionality in the base system that is not visible for the user sometimes because as I say we have needs like we have to release less and this infrastructure has to be

there. Sometimes because the OpenSUSE cycles are really short and when the next release is coming and we have a lot of things to do. And the other challenge is the community. We would like yas to be used as a platform for development people actually consuming and contributing to it. Also we would like

to outsource everything that we don't want to focus on I mean there are a lot of modules we really inside the team we don't have anyone interested in those modules because nobody I don't know I don't I don't have a mainframe in my office. We sell mainframes configuration to other companies so

we cool that actually the same people that use the mainframes contribute to yas to add more expertise. Otherwise the features only come directly from the customers and nobody else. So we need to enhance the community and the other topic is distribution so make yas part citizen of also add distributions. We set a lot of rules like in the past especially in a

package management area to leverage technologies used by others. For example the patch format is now the same as Fedora uses. We have a package kit provider that works pretty well and this makes really more

straightforward to use the yas or pieces of yas in add distributions but there are still a lot of problems because you have three stages. First you need to get the code built which is already hard I mean try to compile libzip on on mandriva and they use a complete different rpm headers and it just doesn't build and we don't have the time to every time we do make in our

system to actually test if it builds in mandriva but we can solve that with some automation and quality issuance like we have for example now automated builds for the software stack and when a developer makes a change in the code we automatically trigger a rebuild run the complete test case and

if the test case pass we create an rpm and send it to the build service so in the build service the zip head project has rpms that are from the latest check-in of a developer that didn't break anything. We think we can follow the same approach to integrate with other distributions. Once it builds you need to actually work that things work and yas still has a lot of

code that assumes a lot of things about the system and you don't want to end in a position like webmin with that claims to support every distribution but nobody dares to try because it can break everything so one of the things we have to we can add value for example we introduce

package history and this is a quite interesting feature because the infrastructure is really really simple just leave zip write the history of everything that is happening to your system like installing packages removing and why so important why you can just look at the rpm database and

see the timestamps because the infrastructure is there we are missing the viewer which is something probably Jano will implement for zipper I'm not going to select some kind of viewer to see what have you done to the system

and oops sorry and also is the first step to try to do a rollback we have dreamed with rollback for ages it has been a feature that is every cycle over we want rollback when we try to approach it we realize that it's really

hard but then why try to solve the hard problem let's try to start with a simple one let's why not rollback the last package you installed or the last is the last group of transactions you did so we are going to try that and also there is some feature which is called system cleanup you install

things to try and especially Linux is just install install install and then you don't know what what is in there that actually you need what not and getting rid of things you don't need is basically looking all the packages that are not required by other packages which is called the leaf

packages but it's not true that every leaf package is unused because there you can have a program that you install yourself so you need to know if actually you install the program or the program was triggered by as a requirement for other for other so that information is actually there when we write this log we know that it was it was the user or if it was the solver

who triggered them the request so if Michael Fred the sub-solver author does the algorithm he told he will do we couldn't we could fit the server with this information and actually create some kind of algorithm to clean up the system that would be really really nice just in case the lock is now there

it's a simple text lock so you can use it as a sysadmin to see what happened to your system all they also all the output of the scripts is there We will invest a little bit in the partitioner because we already started investing in it and it's a the storage area is growing quite fast and people need to

understand what the complex stack of how a storage system is built they need to understand it easily so from the code from select experience we will learn what will be the feedback of the customers about the new redesign we

will work a little bit there especially with some less features using tempfs probably extra for FS we will be also that even if we don't have to do it it will be in even if we will need to do it at some point because everyone else will have it that's for example how it looks the storage now in

trunk which is already much nicer with all the difference icons for the for every kind of storage device and also some kind of overviews we are doing usability tests there with user read equipment to follow the eyes of people how much they need to switch the eyes from here to here and try to adapt

that is mostly I think the area where I'm most investing in usability what about the community I present you the YaaS community the current situation is actually not good the mailing list a lot of people

participating in it we have a lot of bug reporters I think that position is completely filled already and we have a couple of people that do pretty nice contributions like Benjamin Bevere who invented the one-click install and other guys doing modules we have people contributing to the liby UI which is you know that YaaS has this library can you do QT and cursors GTK and you

can use that library in your own software development if you need to do software without depending on YaaS competing dependent of YaaS and we have some people using this library in the company to create multi multi UI software we need to grow that part and I think that can be can be done

also moving YaaS stopping thinking that open source is the world and moving YaaS more to other distributions also then you will get people automatically because open source is also not the biggest community out there I mean if you look at Debian Ubuntu fedora they are also quite big so if we move

there we might get people and we need to actually lower the barrier because we can't expect people to help if they can't they need to learn I mean there are projects that people doesn't help you doesn't mean that your

software is bad there are a lot of communities out there including open office for example it's a great software but they also complain that they don't have developers try to build open office you need a day if you want to learn how to just how to build it you want to do a change you need probably more time but if you look other projects like Firefox in Firefox you can create an extension in five minutes by reusing the same knowledge about

HTML and JavaScript you have so they did really nice there I haven't seen for example as many extensions for conqueror even if I am a KD developer I would prefer to use conqueror but why do I need to learn all this stuff just to make extension this you are not that important to waste my time on that

and we have to learn also that we are not so important to actually get all the people to learn or api's or ycp languages and so on so we are doing we need to open the yast for other kind of knowledge out there and also help

participation using the build service we moved some praise to the git repositories to allow easily cloning and forking of our project let's see if it that works and we need to reduce complexity I don't know if anyone has seen this complexity with all the build service repositories for us is a

nightmare I mean we have repositories that build any kind of unstable and stable project on every architecture or any distributions well the first the first example is actually fake I made it up but the second one is actually real there is a repository called level language Ruby extensions

compiled for OpenSUSE 11.1 built on top of the repository level language Ruby which is not the official Ruby that you find the distribution and if people that has to do long with SUSE in a long time they understand what that means and they can they can understand the distribution but other people don't and they just report back like I am a user I got kd4 with SUSE I don't

like it I want the new one that is out there and I install it and it doesn't work so what was the problem it needs another repository to be added to fulfill dependencies but why do we need to waste time explaining that it should work out of the box for that we can leverage some new infrastructure we have

also seen the last version like Jan explained it we have the sieve services sieve services I use how I'm with time okay we have it's less uses that

because it's less talk with a novel customer center and knows which customer has which products so when you add another app repository in the enterprise SUSE it sends the the idea of the client and in the server side we know which customer it is and which repos he can use for updates so we

send him a service totally customized from him that has a list of repos that changes every time he refreshed this list and if we someday we want to merge two repos we can do it on the server side this can be used in OpenSUSE to also reduce a lot the complexity of repositories because the user is already interacting with the build service he has an account there he has a list of favorite repositories so he could put all this information in the

server which already is and then the machine could just say other service URL from the build service that has the login of the user or something like that and also pass as a header the distribution and get back all the recent report he needs even with dependencies then he if he want to go

more risky and say I want one more level of instability he could just set it in his account and he could get back a different list of repos the next time and at least we'll also solve problems for example of distribution upgrade right now we do the distribution upgrade and we need to

disable all the repositories and try to see which one will work in the next version and then react them again after it's a mess we can solve with infrastructure we have now I'm not sure if this will if this one will be priority for the next version but we will surely work on it later and then we have this problem I mean I'm pretty sure more than one of you had this problem

with trying to upgrade OpenSUSE the problem is that if you want community to actually get involved they need to easily follow the follow the distribution in the latest state and if it's frustrating they just will say oh in Debian everything works and I will go just to Debian actually in Debian

doesn't work I have used Debian but we can still make it easy there are a lot of reasons why this doesn't work one of the reason is of course as Peter mentioned in his talk before not everybody has a connectivity that allows

you to download the terabytes we mentioned before so we are working on this right now and it will be almost sure in the next version which is leveraging the mirror brain we have in OpenSUSE and we are going to switch libzip to stop using curl a stupid HTTP client to use aria which actually

understand these meta links can record information about how was your connections using the path so this mirror was faster and can then reload these these rankings of mirrors and reuse them again combine it with the rankings the mirror brain suggests and so on always download the most

efficient things also if it fails it doesn't tell you immediately this fail press cancel continue but it will try a little bit harder to get the stuff down so that's one of the things that can make a better experience for people and the next things are factory has been pushed less RPMs if

RPM doesn't change it doesn't make any sense to send out an RPM with a timestamp but the same content and this is mostly done it was not done in the last week you can see the blocks out there we could use delta RPMs in factory and that's part of the infrastructure we have since 11.0 you can use delta RPMs in any repository even if you don't have

patches in that repository and we could use that for delta at least from the latest factory state we could offer deltas for the people and this thing we are also working on right now which is change the commit policy of libzip in a more flexible way your installing is fine to download one RPM install it download one RPM and install it if you are doing like this upgrade maybe you

want first to get all the RPMs and then start because if it fails in the middle or if you are in some place where you don't have good connectivity or something you can basically scrub your machine and then you are this is for sure coming for the next one we also have bargain I'm

going to be a little faster so I can show you the the demo of the next part bargain is a tool to do the divs upgrade the same same as the same thing as zipper at this upgrade but in graphical yast and it will be used also in this less for doing the migration from one is to the next service pack it's basically this upgrade in a graphical way and then it's the all

the yast use cases we have yast talks people want to use the yast functionality from a lot of different scenarios and that's what we are trying to find a common way for developers to use yast we have for example the divas desktop people example and that is the example of the

samba sharing if you want to share a folder with the network what do you where do you expect to find the functionality that says in a share this folder you expect us to right-click on the folder and find share this folder but nobody expects to open yast as root and then go to

samba client and other share folder so that's the use case we were we are trying to enable for the desktop people which is basically provide some functionality like sharing a folder or open a firewall port via divas you can see similar interfaces like packagekit for example in the

enterprise we have different requirements people want to talk with anybody knows what team is okay if who doesn't have heard about it you don't need to know about it but it's a really complex enterprise language

which is used by some really proprietary stuff storage they claim to be open but it's a committee design technology but we need to support it and we have to use they have the use cases for them and we will support it so what do we have in common if you want to you people as developers to help us what do you know that everybody actually knows anybody has a hint I

mentioned the fire for example before I think the only way that we could talk in common when developing is actually the web it's the only thing everyone knows every language we have out there knows how to use HTTP almost every

people can write HTML or some JavaScript and not everyone wants to get involved in just in the deeps inside of yes some people just want to make a cool program that uses you have to do some cool thing so that's something we are working on there is already a prototype it's a just web service it

runs in the system provides a rest style API the same kind of API you find on Twitter flicker and all these nice website that will be bankrupt in one year this running your system as a normal user doesn't require root and uses spam and policy kit to actually you can set up different access right

for different tasks and it also uses package kit for the software management and uses some other just functionality using the SCR of just as a diva service this allows you basically to configure just using crawl if you want

I will show a small example and also we are working in a web UI that is a race application this template is we look in Google for free templates and that's why we got so if you want to help us to create a nice UI you are welcome this is not something finished we wanted to show that we could write

this all this functionality with 600 line of code and that's what it has so that's our strategy for the next versions we want to provide for all the people that have different requirements we are using I think those technologies access to the use cases and I think the most important for us will be the

web in the next time to leverage the same success other tools have for example the build service providing REST API's you know the OSC client and all those tools so let's see if we we are of course wanting help any people with web skills can also help us now and you all the code is in the git

repository I'm going to show a small demo how this works if I still have the time so if you have the just reps everything started running you just go to localhost and this port and you find the documentation it shows all the

modules that are available and you have some documentation about how you can configure it how you can log in you can log in using a normal account of the system normally you will use root because it does all the power but if you want to use your own account you only need to set up some policy kit

rights if you want to allow some tasks to be done it uses SSL to protect the logging I don't have SSL configure so I will just do a normal HTTP authentication so for example the logging request I will show the this is

how a login request looks like you need to pass this I'm not going to pass the false one because this is not my password but so let me find the right yeah so this will be how I can do a curl post request to the local server and

I'm passing there the XML you saw before with my password if you do this just will try to create a cookie with policykit and will give me back

all the vacation token in a cookie and then I can I can use this cookie for example let's show if we post this to the user namespace of the HTTP we can create a new user for example I will show you that I don't have a 2x2 user

in etcetera password there is nobody and it's everything right news user so if I pay this and I pass the same cookie I got before I'm passing the

cookie there that's authentication don't worry about the speed because of course it's a prototype right now we are using race with even with a database to you to get use of some XML functions but we are working on a

much faster implementation usually the post requests are quite slow the get requests are quite fast so we did we got any we got I think everything okay so now there is the new user for example and you can do use as a normal

user this will be cool when for example SUSE studio could configure an appliance without even using their own UI or you could write command-line clients so that's the presentation and now let's use the five minutes for some questions thank you sorry sir how mature is that this how much mature

it's a the web client how how long do you think it will take to to be stable

okay I do I have a novel disclaimer here because everything I say is not scheduled promise we are targeting it for the 11 to sp1 of less as a preview technology preview that means from till that moment the API will probably

change a lot but after that we will at least release system time configuration language configuration patch management and what else you here you can see all the modules all those modules will be probably in the

next version users permissions patches language system time service enable and disabling and logging of course we are going to focus in the small things appliance need and then we will we will not probably develop audio configuration play in a long time it's not our priority I've just a

question yeah this race of sort of web front could be the base for a future remote automated management that's idea that once you have a rest interface from one system you can create another rest interface that actually

talks to a lot of systems which is the same that seem aims to but the only thing is that everyone here speaks web who bodies big seems here right my question my next question was that one because I knew that sim tries to do some sort of like this and my next question was if you are starting a

alternate way for non corporate users or I would say let's see how much success we have with with the first version and maybe it becomes a standard by default as a Linux management a cheap way to do it we are not competing I guess in because we also support him we are writing providers for

storage and software management but this is for the community we want everyone to be able to configure the system not only experts basically all right thanks if we I only have one minute left so I can answer one more question and if then someone has any question you can reach me at the booth

outside well okay I'm going to ask you something about the package management you said something about implementing cleanup functionality that would enable the user to to get rid of leaf nodes he doesn't need I think I don't think I get the question you I said about implementing which

functionality the package management cleanup functionality which would enable users to get rid of leaves he doesn't need the the information whether a package was installed by the user or it was installed to satisfy dependency will be kept in some logs how about if I if I write my own

program to to install RPMs it wouldn't be able to to to use the I mean wouldn't it be better to this information to be to be in the very RPM database so that

any tool could use it and not in the logs okay I understand your question the the C block of the has all the information for programs going through if you use another program that just called RPM or you use our use RPM the common line we don't have the information going to the log that's

true we discussed about using the other base but the problem is that the RPM project is in a really strange situation they have like two forks conflicting people the main developers of someone and people that is not famous to be nice and so on so to sort the answer if now you install the program with RPM we we actually realize that but we assume that that program

was installed by the user that which actually you do because in RPM you cannot get the program installed by dependencies okay the time is over sorry so I can reach you out if