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.