Bug#1110221: release-notes: Desktop restarts during upgrade
On Sat, 2 Aug 2025 16:14:35 +0100 Justin B Rye
<justin.byam.rye@gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard Lewis wrote:
> >>> This can be triggered if you specifically tell needrestart to restart
> >>> processes that are usually left un-restarted, but the package
> >>> needrestart probably isn't even installed on your machine.
> >>
> >> Cinnamon desktop on Xorg and I do have install needrestart, which I
> >> forgot about, so it's probably that.
> >
> > should the release-notes tell people to do something to needrestart to
> > prevent this happening? or is this a bug in needsrestart?
>
> Needrestart _shouldn't_ do this - it maintains a blacklist of types of
> service that shouldn't be automatically restarted, which includes
> display managers and so on - but it does allow users to override that
> blacklist. It would be useful to know whether Guillermo accidentally
> ordered it to shoot him in the foot*, or whether it's weirdly buggy
> (you'd think this kind of issue would already have been reported), or
> whether it's a complete red herring after all and something else went
> wrong.
>
> While I'm trying to imagine a way of testing it, we might as well also
> be thinking about what we might say in the Release Notes if necessary.
> We do after all have that systemd-run trick lying around if we need
> an antidote to offer in section 4.1.5.
>
> Users running GNOME [does it matter whether it's on Wayland? Might
> this also apply to KDE?] who have activated [needrestart,
> bootsniper-tng, GNOME killing-spree mode...] may wish to protect
> themselves against the possibility of an accidentally restarted user
> session by running the upgrade from `screen` or `tmux` within a
> `systemd-run` wrapper (e.g. `systemd-run --scope --user screen`).
>
> Except I never did really understand how that interacts with GNOME
> killing-spree mode, and now I can't find all the Salsa discussions
> from back in March.
>
> (* As in the old slogan "Debian GNU/Linux: giving you the power to
> shoot yourself in each toe individually!")
> --
> JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
> sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
>
>
Okay, I did a quick test on a VM and needrestart blacklist works properly.
By default, it restarts the services:
- accounts-daemon, avahi-daemon, colord, cups-browsed, cups, fwupd,
packagekit, polkit, power-profiles-daemon, systemd-journald,
systemd-manager, systemd-timesyncd, systemd-udevd, systemd-user, udisks2
and upower.
It excludes:
- dbus, getty@tty1, lightdm, ModemManager, NetworkManager,
systemd-logind and wpa_supplicant.
Restarting with the default list doesn't close the session and then
retriggering needrestart manually and selecting dbus restarts the session.
Yesterday, I think I just manually selected everything and shoot myself
in the foot because I don't always know 100% what I'm doing or remember
everything I have installed on my laptop.
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