Bug#1110221: release-notes: Desktop restarts during upgrade
Holger Wansing wrote:
>> needrestart in the default config prompts what should be restarted.
>> I doubt intended behaviour of needrestart qualifies as a bug, and
>> it's users need to remember they have it.
>
> At some time we had the recommendation, to start the upgrade from virtual console, not from X.
> Maybe we need that to come back ....
>
> I personally still do it like this.
Unfortunately if this was GNOME's killing-spree mode, being logged in
"outside" the graphical session wouldn't help, because these days with
desktop environment processes running as a big mess of independent
services instead of all being children of a window manager, logind
doesn't try to distinguish. Under at least some circumstances (one of
them being if the option KillUserProcesses is set to "Yes", which has
at times been the upstream default), restarting GNOME sprays userspace
with kill signals to ensure no VT logins or cronjobs or detached tmux
sessions survive.
So in fact it would be a *bad* idea to advise users to start from a
virtual console, because they'll think that means they're free to log
out of their GNOME session halfway through the upgrade.
Fortunately the dist-upgrade *shouldn't* involve a restart, but just
as a precaution these days I always do it under fvwm3.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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