Access to the System (SCR in General)

In the introductory chapter we have already heard something about accessing the system with SCR. Because manipulating the system at the lowest layer is all YaST is about, we now want to take a closer look at this topic.

Basically the SCR creates a consistent view of the system hardware and its configuration files. There are many dependencies between the different entities among those data and these dependencies have to be taken into consideration when manipulating them. For this being possible in a convenient way for the higher-level modules there must be an easy and consistent accessing method. This method is provided by the SCR as it presents kind of an abstraction of the various types of data to be handled.

Now the data “landscape” that must be covered here is rather heterogeneous. Hardware data and configuration data, both of most multifaceted type can hardly be handled by one single monolithic program. Therefore the SCR consists of a “head” that is accompanied by various helper programs, the so-called agents, each of them being specialized on a specific task.