Zypper

ZYpp (or libzypp) is a package manager engine that powers Linux applications like YaST, Zypper and the implementation of PackageKit for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Unlike some more basic package managers, it provides a satisfiability solver to compute package dependencies. It is a free and open-source software project sponsored by Novell and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 or later. ZYpp is implemented mostly in the programming language C++.

Zypper is the native command-line interface of the ZYpp package manager to install, remove, update and query software packages of local or remote (networked) media. Its graphical equivalent is the YaST package manager module. It has been used in openSUSE since version 10.2 beta1. In openSUSE 11.1, Zypper reached version 1.0. On June 2, 2009, Ark Linux announced that it has completed its review of dependency solvers and has chosen ZYpp and its tools to replace the aging APT-RPM, as the first distribution to do so. Zypper is also part of the mobile Linux distributions MeeGo, Sailfish OS, and Tizen.

Following its consecutive acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE GmbH in 2003, Novell decided to merge both package management systems, YaST package manager and Red Carpet, in a best of breed approach, as the two solutions so far were used at Novell. Looking at the extant open source tools and their maturity available back in 2005, none fulfilled the requirements, and were able to work smoothly with the extant Linux management infrastructure software developed by Ximian and SUSE, so it was decided to get the best ideas from extant pieces and to work on a new implementation. Libzypp, the resulting library, was planned to be the software management engine of the SUSE distributions and the Linux Management component of the Novell ZENworks Management suite.