Re: Announce: script to automatically restart services after update of dependencies

["Eugene V. Lyubimkin" <jackyf@debian.org>]

On 2012-06-19 14:01, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 15:29 +0300, Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > On 2012-06-19 13:59, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
> > > This implies that an "apt-get install library" needs to trigger that
> > > restart.
> > > Which means that apt-get needs to depend on restart-services. So either
> > > restart-services and checkrestart should go into the apt package, or apt
> > > needs
> > > to depend on/recommend debian-goodies, which would currently pull in
> > > python,
> > > perl, curl, dialog and their respective dependencies.
> > > 
> > > The later may be a technically working solution, but from a conceptual and
> > > a
> > > KISS point of view doesn't make sense to me.
> > > 
> > > Is my conclusion correct so far?
> > > 
> > > So if we want a "clean" solution, then checkrestart/restart-services would
> > > need
> > > to move into apt and get rid of the non-essential dependencies (get
> > > rewritten in
> > > shell or C).
> > 
> > I believe this is a wrong layer for proposed functionality -- apt-get
> > (libapt) is not the only high-level package manager for Debian.
> >
> > If I were you, I'd look into dpkg file triggers instead. Triggers will
> > by the way automatically solve the problem that you don't restart
> > a service 5 times if 5 libraries were upgraded.
> 
> But we still need one trigger per service?  I don't think that's a good
> idea.

Not necessarily, I imagine there can be a package 'restart-services'
which would declare a trigger on all dynamic libraries and then on
trigger invocation it will check&restart needed services.

That however indeed depends on some details of actual
restart-services utilities and trigger processing which I don't know,
so I'm just proposing that for evaluation.

CC'ing debian-dpkg@ to hear an opinion of dpkg folks.

Should that idea be not workable, I agree that using APT hooks might be
a good alternative to hardcoding anything to libapt (which I object to).

-- 
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com
C++ GNU/Linux developer, Debian Developer