Aug 2, 2013

YaST in Ruby


As already announced on Factory, yast-devel, and by Lukáš: YaST, the SUSE installation and configuration tool, has been automatically translated from YCP, an in-house custom language, to Ruby. In the past 6 months, we have built a tool to translate 600.000 lines of code developed over the course of 12 years.

My role in the project was mainly shedding light on ancient details of the YCP language and its interpreter. Stop pulling my beard, kids! Also, knowing Bison (the tool used to implement the YCP parser in C++) I designed a part that transfers the comments. Mind you, not only at the function or statement level, but from inside of expressions too. Fun!

Thanks to the team, it was great working on the project with you!