Re: PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

[Sam Varshavchik]

Andrew Lutomirski writes:

>  My point is that a lot of this exposure could be avoided.  Sure,
>  there's a decent chance that updating packages will crash running
>  programs.  But, unless one of those programs is dnf, rpm, or systemd,
>  that shouldn't be an excuse to blow up the whole upgrade. 
I agree.

As far as I'm concerned, the only possible valid reason for the system to  
end up in an inconsistent state would be if the whole thing got SIGKILLed.

And I strongly doubt that an X crash would SIGKILL some process started by  
dnf. SIGHUP would be more likely. Perhaps SIGTERM, but neither of those  
should result in dnf blowing chunks and messing things up. Either the most  
recent transaction should be rolled back, or completed anyway.

The notion that an X crash would result in such situation is quite … 
inexplicable. There's simply no valid, logical reason for that, and I'm  
quite disappointed to hear that.

>  Firefox blow up many times due to concurrent dnf, but this
> doesn't
>  hose my system.  Having gnome-terminal or X or Wayland die shouldn't
>  be any more dangerous. 
Agreed.

And even if dnf itlsef is SIGKILLed, that may certainly result in a system  
being temporarily in an inconsistent state, but I would expect that unless  
something like glibc was in the process of being unpacked, it should be  
recoverable.