What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 17:31:12 UTC 2008


Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 7:04 AM, Michal Schmidt <mschmidt at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 9 Dec 2008 01:25:40 +0100
>> Robert Scheck <robert at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>>> [PackageKit] kills my Firefox nicely during package updating,
>>> well-well done.
>> Running instances of Firefox always break when the Firefox package is
>> being updated. It does not matter what you use for the update (rpm,
>> yum, PK). This is not PackageKit's fault.
> 
> In general, any software can break when a running copy has its files
> swapped out from under it.  XULRunner-based apps exacerbate this flaw
> in the package system because they use versioned directories.

Errr... versioned directories should make it possible to keep the old 
one running, not the other way around.  Removing a still-needed 
directory is the problem.

> But it's not Firefox's fault either.  Think about icons, glade files,
> etc. that might be included in software.
> 
> It's something that really needs to be fixed in yum/rpm.  Windows has
> a notion of "update this file after reboot", which might be the way to
> go.

Unix normally gets away with live updates because any currently open 
files remain accessible until the last close.  However, in this age of 
extensive plugins and modules with runtime loading, you either have to 
make sure they are all versioned like shared libraries should be or you 
kill the app that needs them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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