YAST and YUM Front-end

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Sun, 09 May 2004 18:40:55 -0400, Rory Gleeson > But seriously, the
company that gets the Package Manager right will get
> the customers.  Mandrake has tried but hasn't quite made it, although
> they've done a decent job. Their manager is just split in to too many
> different drakes now.  They need to go back, simplify and bring them all
> together, as posters here are suggesting needs to be done with a Yum
> front-end that accomplishes all tasks.

People suggest a lot of things...but it doesn't mean they have a
significant perspecifive to understand the full ramifications of their
comments. Its not clear to me that the all-in-one package management
AND system configuration tool that YAST is the best way forward. There
is an argument that seperate configuration tools  are a better
approach. And I'm sure if you try hard enough you will find several
previous discussions about several other system configuration
frameworks, like linuxconf or even webmin and why they aren't being
used in recent rhl and fedora releases. (YaST) Yet another Setup Tool,
is aptly named..its yet another centralized tool, i see no reason to
believe it won't have similar issues than linuxconf or other
centralized module based setup tools have that have come before.


> While it may take a bit of humility for Red Hat to consider the idea of
> adopting YAST, there's nothing wrong with incorporating YAST in to Red
> Hat products, or **at least experimenting with the idea by incorporating
> it in to Fedora Core 3**.  Now that YAST is GPL, a lot of start-up
> distros will quickly embrace it and I think it could easily and quickly
> become a standard.

Yawn.. a lot of smaller distros are planning on sticking with XFree86
as well, doesn't mean squat.

> There's are nothing wrong with open source standards.  Beats forking.

> And vendors would love it. The community needs to get behind vanilla
> kernels (as Fedora is doing), standard RPM's and stop forcing developers
> to modify their software for different distros.  Silly and
> short-sighted.  Make it easy for software manufacturers to build one
> program with one installation method that works on all flavours of Linux
> and Billy Gates problems continue to mount.  YAST may be that solution.

Excuse me while I don't hold my breath, YaST does far more than just
do package management, why not chearlead for Novell's other package
management product Red Carpet, the product thats actually born as open
source. Oh I know why, becuase YaST is the cool new buzzword thanks to
it being open sourced. Lets see if Novell "standardizes" internally on
YaST and kicks Red Carpet to the curb before we start jumping on the
one true setup tool bandwagon.
 
-jef"step 1) re-invent the wheel as closed source  
      step 2) use it and claim its better than open source projects being  
                 developed in parallel
      step 3) open source it after its no longer critical to a business plan
      step 4) encourage everyone else to use your non open source built code    
                 as the basis of an open standard
      step 5) blithely forget that your tools is delibrately named 'Yet 
                 Another...' with all the conotation that implies"spaleta