Improving the offline updates user experience

[Richard Hughes]

On 16 September 2014 10:55, Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac at redhat.com> wrote:
> Just a thought - but wouldn't be better spend time to enlighten
> Gnome/Firefox developers how to write applications in a way the could be
> upgraded runtime

So, it's not just the application, it's every application and D-Bus
service the application uses. Even glibc opens files-as-resources at
runtime. The much bigger issues is if you're using a D-Bus service
like most applications seem to do (and most use quite a few system and
session, directly and indirectly) then you've also got to co-ordinate
and handle changing D-Bus API (which typically isn't versioned). This
means you've got to restart the system DBus service at the right time
in the on-line update, which means co-ordinating with any other open
sessions on the system. Most desktop apps don't just sit in islands on
their own. It's probably okay to live-update powertop on a single-user
system when it's not being run, but anything much more integrated than
that just isn't going to work very well.

Richard