Libyui REST API

In the previous hack week project I was focused on implementing a REST API for testing the YaST modules.

The major functionality of the REST API has been already implemented, the RPM packages are also available in openSUSE (see the libyui*-rest-api packages). What's missing? The REST API is not available in the openSUSE/SUSE installer. If you would like to test the installation workflow then you would need to build a Driver Update Disk with the REST API packages and all dependencies. That's not trivial and it might be even more complicated for some architectures like s390 or aarch64.

So the goal of this project is to include the packages in the default installer.

Details

OK, we should just add some more packages into the installer? It's not that simple. The libyui REST API is special and a vast majority of users do not need it. Actually it could be a problem because it would take the precious memory which we have during installation. The YaST installer must run even with 512MB memory (keep in mind that the installer itself is running from RAM disk) and with additional packages we might not fit into that limit anymore...

Proposed Solution

The installer allows using extensions, we already do that for the gdb tool. It's not included in the installer by default, if you run the gdb command it will fail.

But you can extend the installation system by calling extend gdb which will download the GDB image and mount it. Then you can use the GDB tool as usually.

We want to have this implemented also for the libyui REST API - by default it won't be included in the installer (saving space) but if needed it could be easily included with the extend libyui-rest-api call.