Re: packages with hook interfaces and no documented hook policy
On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 08:54:12PM +0100, Bjørn Mork wrote:
> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> > On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:43:23 +0100
> > Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> wrote:
[..]
> Sorry, I still don't see what's so special about the unattended-upgrades
> cron job. Couldn't e.g. logrotate just as well argue that it should be
> allowed to finish its work before the machin is hibernated? Or any
> program for that matter? hibernate is supposed to freeze running
> processes, not wait for them to finish.
[..]
Sorry for comming into this a bit late, I was traveling. Let me
clarify that a bit (I also added a similar response to the bugreport).
The reason that it blocks the hibernation (only *if* a upgrade is
running in the background while you try to hibernate) is that during a
upgrade you *may* be in the middle of replacing your kernel and
if you continue to hibernate your system may not boot anymore. If no
upgrade is running the hook will exit immediatly.
A alternative design that I prototyped is to split the upgrade into
minimal chunks so that it can be interrupted at anytime that a chunk
is complete. This obviously still blocks shutdown and hibernate, but
for a shorter amount of time. Or a blacklist of known problematic
packages could be added, the trouble with that is that it might miss
something important.
If you have better suggestions how to solve this problem, I'm happy to
hear (and implement) them. Until then I would recomment that you run
the upgrade manually so that you have control over when exactly it
happens.
Cheers,
Michael
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