On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 11:04:12AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 09:31:47AM -0500, Anil Duggirala wrote:> No need to restart for an upgrade. But sometimes, the upgrade will only > take effect after a restart: it's obvious in the case of the kernel, > but also for some core libraries. > Why has this become a "default" behavior, at least with Gnome, in Debian Stretch then ? A notification appears asking the user to upgrade and restart the whole system. If it is not necessary, why has this feature been implemented as part of the DE?Because the feature comes from GNOME, who have always been interested in supporting the least knowledgeable user whenever possible. For those users, it is hard to explain how an update might or might not take effect without a reboot.
Really? The 'needrestart' package seems to do quite a good job of this. The main issue is that, if a library is upgraded, then a long-running process probably won't notice (aside: on Linux, one can delete a file and replace it, but a process with a handle to the old file generally won't be affected). needrestart scans the process table after an upgrade and, if a process has a handle to a deleted library, it is noted. If that process is part of a service, needrestart gives the option to restart the service. If the process is part of user session, then needrestart can pop-up a message telling the user to either restart the application (e.g. in the case of their browser) or to logout-login (e.g. in the case of a window manager).
Now, it may be the case that there are so many applications running that it's just as easy to reboot as it is to close and restart them all, but that's up to the user.
-dsr-
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