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The last of YaST?
The announcement of the openSUSE Leap 16.0 beta contained something of a surprise—along with the usual set of changes and updates, it informed the community of the retirement of ""the traditional YaST stack"" from Leap. The YaST ("Yet another Setup Tool") installation and configuration utility has been a core part of the openSUSE distribution since its inception in 2005, and part of SUSE Linux since 1996. It will not, immediately, be removed from the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution, but its future is uncertain and its fate is up to the larger community to decide.
YaST has undergone a number of revisions and rewrites over the years. The original YaST was replaced by YaST2 in 2002, and the project was released as open source, under the GPLv2, in 2004. YaST features graphical and text-based user interfaces, so it can be used on the desktop or via the shell. "Setup Tool" undersells what YaST does by a significant margin. It is the system installer, used for both interactive and unattended installations. It is also a tool for software management and performs a wide variety of system-management tasks—including user management, security configuration, and setting up printers.
For many years, YaST was implemented in its own programming language, YCP, which was phased out and mostly replaced with Ruby around 2013 as part of the YCP Killer project. Currently, YaST is written in Ruby, with some of the graphical stack written in C, as well as some legacy bits in Perl and YCP. As the contributing page for the project notes, it is a ""complex system consisting of several components and modules"". Each of YaST's functions, such as managing users, installing software, and configuring security settings, is implemented as a modules. The project's GitHub organization has more than 240 repositories.