Errors in Classifying Updates
The Gnome update tool classifies updates as things that can be
immediately installed, and things that require a reboot to install. I
have never seen an update requiring users to login again, but that
should obviously be a state transition that the Gnome updater should
occasionally need as well. Someone pointed me to the tracer package for
CLI use, and it seems to work well in detecting these missing dependency
issues. However, no such mechanism exists as part of a GUI update.
Much as I disagree with the Gnome devs about the incorrect rationale for
reboots on an inode-based system, I can see the need to do this without
the functionality of something like tracer, for badly-designed apps that
do not correctly identify their run-time dependencies that need
restarting to maintain system integrity.
Its relatively difficult to find packages that can be immediately
installed, and it only seems to be seen in actual practice in maybe
1-in-50 updates. Since (say) 80% of updates are not "system" updates,
this seems intuitively very wrong. Reboots due to updating should be
very rare. Instead, they are 95% of the updates in practice. Clearly,
something is wrong.
This morning I ran the GUI updater. There were updates available for
the vim-filesystem and vim minimal packages. However, they are for some
weird reason marked as requiring a system restart in order to install.
That just stumps me. How can Vim possibly be an update requiring a
system reboot?
So, is there a problem in the dependencies lists of the packages, or is
it a bug in the Gnome updater app?
--
John Mellor