packages requiring me to reboot...

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> you're an experienced user? You're comfortable knowing what does and what
> does not require a reboot? Then why are you using PK?
>
> Disable pk and do the updates directly via yum.
>
> Bam - no more requests to reboot.

This is a completely bogus rationale but one I commonly hear on this list.

I, and many other fedora users would be quite *capable* of running our
systems with any help of a distribution, we could go and fetch from
source and do all the integration ourselves...

...but we'd actually like to get some work done using our computers
and don't want to burn our lives away playing master-of-my-own-distro,
though we're willing to spend some time contributing to a shared
effort to build a good distribution for many.

In exchange for not having to personally micro-manage things, we're
willing to tolerate some things being configured in violation of our
own preferences or aesthetics, or even a few things being outright
broken, but that doesn't mean that it's not important for it to work
right.

Yes, I'm quite capable of executing some big manual process or
changing packagekit to behave like I want. But every such action has
costs, it takes time and effort which usually has to be repeated every
upgrade. The non-standard configuration carries the risk of triggering
bugs in other system components, breaking the upgrade process, etc.

The gratuitous reboots are harmful to all users.  They diminish a
significant advantage our systems can have compared to alternatives
like Microsoft Windows. They discourage the reporting of bugs in
applications… "System acting weird? Just restart!".  When triggered at
inconvenient times they can cause significant harm by interrupting
people's work.

Yes— users with more expertise are more likely to complain about this,
but thats not reason to dismiss the issue. If there were truly a
disconnect here betweens the needs of the novices and those of the
expert users you could argue favouring the novices, but that just
isn't applicable here.