policy-question: auto-restart of services on update

[Björn Persson]

Reindl Harald wrote:
>   is it really a good decision to restart services after update in
> the %post section?
> 
> currently my hardest work is rebuild packages without this especially
> for dist-upgrades with "yum" because in this case many would fail because
> they are restarted in the middle of the transaction and not all deps are
> updated

Restarting daemons after an update is a good idea, especially in the case of 
security updates. You don't want a vulnerable version to continue running 
after you think you have updated to the fixed version. Yes you can restart them 
manually if you're aware that you need to, but you shouldn't need to remember 
such things. Automating tedious work is exactly what computers are for.

Doing the restart in %post may not be the best idea. Restarts should be done 
at the end of the transaction, after all the new packages have been installed 
and all the old ones have been removed. I think that's supposed to be the time 
when %posttrans scripts are run.

> mind a machine where postfix, dovecot, dbmail... are relying on mysqld
> the automatic restart of mysqld causes a lot of troubles if oyu are not
> stop all the other services before

Anything that keeps a persistent database connection should be able to 
reconnect if it loses the connection and then continue operating normally. If 
it doesn't, I'd call that a bug.

Björn Persson
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