In our previous post we reported we were working in some mid-term goals in the areas of AutoYaST and storage management. This time we have more news to share about both, together with some other small YaST improvements.

• Several enhancements in the new MenuBar widget, including better handling and rendering of the hotkey shortcuts and improved keyboard navigation in text mode.
• More steps to add a menu bar to the Partitioner. Check this mail thread to know more about the status and the whole decision making process.
• New helpers to improve the experience of using Embedded Ruby in an AutoYaST profile (introduced in the previous post). Check the documentation of the new helpers for details.
• Huge speed up of the AutoYaST step for “Configuring Software Selections” by moving some filtering operations from Ruby to libzypp. Now the process is almost instant even when using the OSS repository that contains more than 60.000 packages!
• A new log of the packages upgraded via the self-update feature of the installer.

The next SLE and Leap releases are starting to shape and we are already working in new features for them (that you could of course preview in Tumbleweed, as usual). So stay tuned for more news in two weeks!