Need to logout on Update

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 21 July 2011 16:51:17 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Updating the on-disc binary of a running process has no effect on said
> process, it simply creates a new file. New execs of the program will
> execute from that file rather than the old one, but the old one will
> persist until the last running instance of it dies. Of course problems
> can in theory arise if a set of interacting processes are partially
> updated, depending on exactly when each of them executes, but in
> practice I've rarely seen any problems with this (mainly I think because
> apps don't tend to change radically from one version to the next,
> especially in their external interfaces).

What about this scenario: an app A occasionally loads a library B in order to 
use some code from there. Suppose that while A is running (and did not load B 
yet because user interaction didn't require it so far) there is an update to 
both A and B (which goes to disk). After this happens, the system is in a 
potentially inconsistent state --- if a user interacts with A so that A asks 
to load B, the *updated* library B will be loaded, which can break A badly, 
depending on the difference between old and new B. If A is restarted, 
everything will be ok, of course, but until then the *old* A is running from 
memory, and loading the new B is a gamble, in general.

For system daemons and services (and even for init AFAIK) this is being solved 
by the automatic restart of the service after the update (I guess this is in 
the rpm's "post"-part of the install), so the system is kept in consistent 
state.

For DE and its apps, the story is different, since rpm cannot "restart" the 
whole DE while the user is logged in. So there is no way for a system to keep 
the DE and its apps in a consistent state after the update, if the user is 
still working in it.

This happens fairly often, in the case of firefox I would say regularly --- 
every time I see firefox being updated in the yum listing, I save all tabs 
before the update begins, close it and reopen it after the update. Every time 
I miss to do that, I get burned by the running version of firefox starting to 
malfunction in all sorts of weird ways.

Aside from firefox crashing/misbehaving regularly after an update, I remember 
that this happened once with ktorrent as well. It was updated while running 
(in the background), and it crashed when I opened up its window again. A 
simple restart fixed it.

All that said, on F14 plasma never crashed on me, updates or otherwise. Of 
course, if I see kde* packages being updated in the yum listing, I either 
postpone the update for later, or save my data, logout and login after the 
update. I am not saying that this is a big issue, it rarely happens, but if 
you don't want nasty surprises, it's better to be on the safe side.

HTH, :-)
Marko