I installed cockpit and its add-ons. It works and I’ve got questions:
There is a section “packages”. I can search for packages and all hits are listed. But how do I get more information about a package? Cockpit only has three columns (name, version, details).
Yast on the other hand offered the installed files of a certain package, which was very convenient. Or if there are different versions installed. Or locked packages.
How can I see in cockpit whether a package is locked? How can I find out whether there are multiple versions of a package? How do I find out which files are installed by a certain package?
I’ve looked for “texlive” and get hundreds of packages like ghc-* , rubygems and whatall: can I customise the search?
The replacement for YaST Software is Myrlyn which offers the same and even more features. Myrlyn supports as only graphical tool a full zypper dup. Myrlyn is now installed by default on Tumbleweed and Leap 16.
The cockpit packages plugin is a standard plugin, provided from upstream, which is not tailored for the special needs of each linux distribution. You can compare it to Discover or Gnome software in some ways.
AFAICT myrlyn is Recommended only by the pattern x11_enhanced. Given general direction to Wayland only desktops, whether it is installed probably depends on the exact desktop environment chosen. I have here truly minimal installation and
zypper install -t pattern gnome
does not result in myrlyn being selected for installation.
Minimal installations and choosing --no-reccommends is a different kind of topic. The normal installation (if not choosen otherwise whilst installation) and also standard setting is with recommends. So if a user decides to tailor the system to his needs, yes it is true, it is possible that Myrlyn dosn’t get installed on its system.
Remember the user who claimed unknowingly that Myrlyn seems like malware to him as it was installed automatically on his system?
OK, the current list of default patterns for Tumbleweed YaST based installation explicitly includes x11 for all GUI variants which pulls in x11_enhanced and myrlyn for all offered GUI options.
On Leap 16.0 the only mandatory pattern is enhanced_base. Selecting e.g. gnome does not pull in x11_enhanced and hence myrlyn. Selecting kde OTOH does pull in myrlyn via x11 pattern.
