Re: Software and Updates Restart notification Stretch
On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 04:14:23PM +0100, Darac Marjal wrote:
> 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).
Sure, needrestart works for Debian. It's not always installed,
though. You could make it a dependency -- and now GNOME depends
on a non-GNOME package. The integration will be different for
each distribution.
The GNOME people don't care. If you want this to happen in Debian,
you need the Debian people packaging GNOME to care about it.
-dsr-
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