Fortunately, Christmas is around the corner and the year 2020 is coming to an end. But the YaST team is not thinking about going on holidays yet. Quite the contrary, we have been working on a broad range of topics as usual. So let’s have a look at some of them.
Polishing the Cockpit Wicked Module
At the end of the sprint, we released a new version of our Cockpit Wicked module. This release does not include big changes but a set of bug fixes and small improvements. Actually, at this point, we have decided to shift our focus from adding features to polishing the module as much as possible.
As part of this new focus, we have asked our usability experts how to build a better user experience. Additionally, we have started the process to make the module available for translation in our Weblate instance to get it properly localized.
On the other hand, the initial research for the Cockpit Transactional Update module is over. We are now working on documenting our requirements to resume the development work soon.
Better Support for tmpfs in the Partitioner
While introducing the new storage stack in SLE 15, we decided to drop support for creating tmpfs
entries in the /etc/fstab using AutoYaST. After all, systemd is already taking care of handling
such file
systems.
However, our users want this behavior back and we are now introducing proper handling in YaST for
tmpfs file systems.
As a first step, we added support in the partitioner to manage those entries. Please, beware that
YaST will only take care the devices listed in /etc/fstab. Any tmpfs file system created by
systemd or any other mechanism is out of our scope.
By the way, we already started to work on AutoYaST support, so stay tuned if you are one of those users missing this feature.
Open Discussion: Easy Way to Change Installer Settings
For quite some time, there has been a feature request to allow changing the installer settings at runtime. However, we are still unsure how it should look and which use cases we should cover.
The discussion is still ongoing, but we have opened a GitHub issue to discuss it further. So, if you feel you can help, feel free to join the conversation.
But That’s Not All
As usual, we have been working on many more things. So let’s select a few of them that you might find interesting:
- Fix detection of para-virtualized guests in Kdump (yast-kdump#118.
- Fix the product selection when using the full media (yast-installation#895).
- Move from Travis to GitHub Actions. It is still a work in progress, but the most relevant repositories have already been adapted. Check the yast2 repository if you want to see an example.
- Better detection of Btrfs subvolumes prefix (yast-storage-ng#1168).
What’s next?
We have just started the last sprint of 2020. We will slow down our work around our Cockpit modules because we feel that it is time to listen to others to decide what’s next. But we plan to work on many different things, like the storage layer, LibYUI, the installer reconfiguration feature… So if you are curious about what we can achieve during this sprint, let’s meet here in around two weeks.