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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 18.06.12 15:25, Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell at gmail.com) wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> > On 06/18/2012 09:24 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> >> I run Mozilla's nightly builds and receive updates every day. They
> >> disrupt nothing because Mozilla has built infrastructure to make that
> >> possible. Firefox must be restarted for the updates to take effect,
> >> which is when it does the actual swapout of the staged files, but the
> >> restart is basically just a window flickering— tabs retain their
> >> state, including forms— in fact to prove the point I manually
> >> triggered it while writing this email.
> > Your anecdata does not match my anecdata.  Both Firefox and Thunderbird will
> > malfunction in strange and subtle ways if the package is while the
> > application is running.  A restart of the application is required before
> > things start behaving as expected.  There are enough people out there
> > experiencing this that one cannot wave it off as hallucinations.  It is a
> > real problem that exists despite your experience to the opposite.
> 
> I'm not waving it off.  It's something which Mozilla has fixed in
> their nightly update process which is not addressed in Fedora updates
> for Firefox.  Mozilla nightly pre-stages the update and then does the
> update on startup.  When combined with persisting the application
> state across restarts it makes the whole thing painless.  Otherwise,
> yes, it can be problematic, as firefox does runtime dlopening and such
> and can end up inconsistent if you swap out files out from under it.

Well, even if Mozilla "fixed" that, such a solution wouldn't work for OS
updates, already due to privilege reasons. i.e. "pre-staging" changes as
root which are applied when a user does something simply cannot work if
you care about security or supporting multi-user systems.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.