on software updates

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2015-02-04 at 07:00 -0800, Casey Jao wrote:
> 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.

Please don't top-post.

I was considering the tighter characterization of a 'safe' app to 
update, not your broader one. I am happy to defer to those who've 
spent more time dealing with it than me - i.e. hughsie - when they say 
that, no, it isn't really 'safe' to update your web browser online. 
(I'm equally happy to say 'meh' and go ahead and do it anyway, but 
that's my *personal* decision for *myself*, it doesn't mean that's the 
appropriate default for Fedora).

Even on 'slower moving' distributions I'd think it'd be relatively 
rare for an update set to *only* include packages which contained docs 
or static data or a very static application. And this is the *Fedora* 
devel@ list, so I'm not really sure how relevant these 'slower moving' 
distributions are to us? They're free to choose their own default 
update systems, of course.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net