Hi,
it was great meeting some of you at systemd.conf last week!
I looked a bit packaging cockpit for Debian and for that I had a look at the existing spec file.
I understand why components like cockpit-{networkmanager,pcp,docker,kubernets} are subpackages. Those subsystems are not necessarily installed/used, so making it possible to uninstall the subpackages makes sense.
What I don't understand is why cockpit, cockpit-ws, cockpit-bridge and cockpit-shell have been split up.
Looks to me, as you will always need at least those four packages installed to have some basic functionality.
Regards, Michael