The YaST Team just finished the last sprint before the Christmas break of this convulted 2020. So let’s start the festivities by celebrating what we have achieved in the latest two weeks. That includes:

• Several additions to AutoYaST
• Better management of required packages
• Usability improvements in the registration process
• Drop of the SysVinit support
• Translation infrastructure for the wicked Cockpit module

Let’s go into the details.

You may remember that we recently introduced support in the YaST Partitioner for tmpfs mount points and for Btrfs subvolume quotas. Now those technologies have been incorporated to AutoYaST. See this pull request for some overview of the tmpfs support or this other one if you want to check the full documentation. If you are more curious about Btrfs subvolume quotas, check this pull request for some general description with screenshots or the documentation one for more comprehensive information.

We also improved how YaST manages the packages to install in order to support the different storage technologies and file systems. During installation, YaST now makes a difference between optional and mandatory packages, which implies it will not longer force you to install ntfsprogs just because there is a leftover NTFS partition somewhere in the system. Moreover, in an installed system YaST only forces installation of those packages strictly needed to perform the Partitioner actions, reducing to a minimum the number of repository refresh operations triggered by the Partitioner.

Regarding the registration process during the installation of SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise), we have been working in a couple of fronts:

• More informative and up-to-date information about the implications of skipping registration when performing a so-called online installation.
• Some experiments (still under discussion) regarding the layout of the registration screen.

In a more general scope, we removed some bits of code in YaST that were still trying to modify the obsolete /etc/inittab file. See the announcement in the yast-devel mailing list about the definitve drop of support for SysVinit.

Going beyond YaST itself, we added internationalization support to our Cockpit module for wicked. The corresponding project is now available in the openSUSE Weblate instance and all the automation is in place to ensure all the translations contributed by our awesome volunteers are incorporated into future releases of the module.

As mentioned at the beginning of the post, this was the last development sprint of 2020, which also means this will be the last blog entry from the YaST Team this year. We will restart the usual development (and reporting) pace after the Christmas and new year season. So there is only one more thing left to say - see you in 2021!