On 12 September 2014 16:16, Nathanael d. Noblet <nathanael(a)gnat.ca> wrote:
Yeah, I almost never use the reboot & install method. 90% of the
packages being installed/updated seem foolish to need a reboot to
update.
I've been called worse that foolish I guess...
I typically do a yum update manually and then if I notice
glibc/kernel/systemd or other big packages do a reboot.
That's just not safe. Have you ever had firefox open and done a
firefox update? Widgets start disappearing, redraws start having weird
artifects and then after a little while it just crashes. Other
applications like LibreOffice behave the same. Anyone that says things
like "the old version of the library stays in memory" obviously hasn't
actually done much real-world GUI programming in the last decade, or
runs any kind of secure desktop system. The *only* way to do this
securely and safely in the system we have now is in a clean pre-boot
environment, which is sad and crap UX, but still nevertheless true.
When we have application sandboxing and a stable OS platform to use,
we can certainly do something more sane, but until then we're just
hacking around the problem.
What we could do is do updates on shutdown by basically killing
everything except PID 1, and then restart everything, but even then
that relies on no systemd or kernel updates being present. Solving the
real problem is much harder (OS + Apps split) but we also need to slow
the firehose of needless updates.
Richard