on software updates

[Casey Jao]

I understand where you are coming from and that a fedora user is likely
to see frequent updates of lots of other packages anyway. But on slower
moving distros where systems components rarely get more than security
updates, browsers might be one of the more frequently updated pieces of
software.

Perhaps my experience is atypical (especially since I'm on F21!), but
after last week's Google Chrome-only update notification (which was the
impetus for this report), today I got another Gnome software prompt to
restart just for google-chrome-stable.

On 02/03/2015 10:22 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-02-02 at 10:50 -0500, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
>>> On 31 January 2015 at 21:57, Casey Jao <casey.jao at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Are there any plans to let packages specify that they do not 
>>>> require a total
>>>> system reboot to be updated?
>>>
>>> Yes, see https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps -- 
>>> basically, you can't do updates of rpm-sourced system-wide app 
>>> deployments without a reboot in a safe way.
>>
>> There are classes of RPMs that definitely can be done without a 
>> reboot in a safe way (documentation-only; packages with a single 
>> executable and no libraries / separate data files; and quite a few 
>> other cases), and letting packagers opt them in to being updated 
>> without a reboot seems like a clear improvement on the status quo.
> 
> It'd only be an improvement if users often saw a set of updates which 
> *only* contained such packages. In my experience that rarely if ever 
> happens.
>