Schedule for Monday's FESCo Meeting (2012-06-18)

[Richard Hughes]

On 18 June 2012 15:32, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> As dbus is required for various things like networkmanager - does this mean
> that if a server happens to be using nm for network setup that in order to
> apply a security patch to dbus, for example, that the server will require a
> reboot?

Well, if we take down NetworkManager, then it's going to disappear
from the bus and come back (hopefully) a few seconds later. Apps /
daemons can cope with this by watching the name-owner-changed signals,
but a *lot* of apps and services don't bother and just go boom with
critical warnings when the connection changes.

> Since more and more we're relying on dbus for server-y processes it feels
> like we'll be adding one more component that requires a reboot for updates
> to take effect. That eats up real time and causes real pain later on for
> admins maintaining systems.

Any self-respecting admin isn't going to be clicking hundreds of
little buttons in a shell GUI on the client machines, and is probably
using RHN or yum and ssh. If they're installing  updates on the server
itself, they probably aren't using the auto-download and
click-button-in-shell method either, but yum on the command line and
restarting services at the weekend.

> Either we need to make dbus something we can sensibly restart or we need to
> rely on it less for server-y tasks (or both).

Look at the process list of the daemons we boot by default on a Fedora
17 desktop install. On my system more than half are using DBus for
IPC. Using DBus "less" just isn't going to happen.

> I understand you're not working on PK for servers but the packaging
> expectations

I don't think any expectations are changing now. There are certainly
no planned changes to the Fedora packaging guidelines at all.

Richard