The zypper
tool in openSUSE 11 has been catching me off-guard. I guess previous versions were like this too, but for some reason I never noticed it or it never bothered me…. Anyway, here’s a tip or two about zypper
‘s behavior…
I’d been noticing that the “PackageKit” update applet in the GUI Panel seemed to be notifying me about more patches than the zypper
command-line tool was aware of. Right now as I type this, in fact, the applet is showing me the green star in my panel, alerting me about 6 optional updates. I run the “zypper lu
” command as I always have, and I get “No updates found.
”
So after looking into it just a *tad* further… um, actually reading the man page…. I discovered that this behavior is because the zypper
only operates on “Patch” type updates by default, and does not show — or operate with — updates of other types. According to the man page, there are 4 types of updates: Package
, Patch
(the default), Pattern
, and Product
.
And since I did all the one-click install for the media handling, I have quite a bunch of repositories and packages and updates and things that are ignored in the standard query.
So now, if I want to see the same updates in zypper
that I see in PackageKit, I type the following:
zypper lu --type package
…and viola… it tells me about the same 6 updates that I’m being notified about in the Gui Panel. Then if I want to get and install the updates, I run:
zypper up --type package
I hope that makes sense to y’all… I don’t know why I never noticed this behavior in the previous versions of openSUSE, maybe it was different… maybe not… If you noticed something I missed, as always, please let me know!
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