Improving the offline updates user experience

[Miloslav Trmač]

----- Original Message -----
> Dne 16.9.2014 v 12:21 Richard Hughes napsal(a):
> > 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
> 
> So it's time to fix D-Bus then as well!
> 
> If something is broken - it will not get fixed by hiding broken design behind
> reboot&upgrade.

Quite true.

> If you can't fix the Firefox (or some other broken tool) and you want to allow
> install of new version - then you need to allow i.e. parallel installs of such
> packages - it's that simple - I've been doing this more then 15 years ago at
> University - so really nothing new here...

Well, what we would need is:
1. Ability to keep multiple versions (both ABI-compatible and ABI-incompatible) of a single application or library or service installed and running at the same time.
2. Ability to detect which processes depend on which versions of which components.
3. Ability to automatically restart such processes without loosing state (either completely transparently or with some user notification for GUIs).

This has all been done before, and can be done again.  (And it would make at least half of the userbase clamoring for containers what they need, without playing ugly complex nontransparent namespace games.)  But let’s be clear about it, 1. means completely changing our filesystem layout, and 3. means changing our process model to go way beyond int main(...).  

It is technically possible, it is the right thing to do.  Do we want to do it and can we do it?

> This 'reboot' idea is just 'somehow' usable maybe for a single seat single
> user desktop - but not anywhere else.
> 
> Has Fedora given up Unix ??

The Unix history is actually closer to “edit header files to match your hardware, then rebuild the kernel and userpace with (make world), and reboot“.  Packaged applications with an ISV source and an update stream separate from the OS have certainly been built on top of Unix but have never been a major design focus.  Arguably the whole point of a “Linux distribution” has been to get closer to the BSD-style single-kernel-and-userspace distribution updated always as a whole.
    Mirek