I’m having trouble installing updates using the Cockpit Software Manager. The problem itself is likely the subject of another thread; my subject here is the error message it gives:
Neither API nor system-packages/update is clickable, and the “Copy command” button copies: echo '{"action":"update","packages":[]}' | /usr/bin/sudo /usr/libexec/nethserver/api/system-packages/update | jq
to the clipboard. I’m trying, and failing, to figure out in what world this would be considered a helpful error message.
In the first place, if I’m going to have to log in to the shell anyway, I’m probably just going to run yum upgrade there. That’s going to give me a considerably clear error message than the JSON output of the command above. But more importantly, IMO, is why the conflict information isn’t being directly presented in the GUI.
The command you have copied must be pasted in a terminal, you will query the same api command of the UI, hence you might have a better output of the error
So if this is a way to manually query the same API as the GUI, and that API generates an error (there’s a dependency error), why isn’t that error shown in the GUI?
Shouldn’t an error message in the GUI be meaningful to a user? Or is this just a reflection of the beta (i.e., in-development) state of the Cockpit GUI, and it’s already intended to be refined before it’s deemed production-ready?
Edit: but even if the JSON output is helpful to you as a dev, why not expose it in the browser? The process of “something went wrong, but we won’t tell you what. To possibly find out, log into the CLI and run this command we won’t even show you” just seems overly complicated and opaque.
The messages is useful for the developers.
It’s hard/impossible to catch some errors in the GUI, so their idea was to “suggest” a command that the user should run to obtain output meaningful for developers (and, maybe, sometimes, for the user).
What do you think about rephrasing as:
The following command failed:
system-settings/update
Unfortunately we couldn’t catch the exact error. If you want to help, please click on the button below to copy the failed command to the clipboard, paste it into the Terminal and submit command output to the developers.
We may even remove the “If you want to help” part.
