Reboot madness? [Was: Re: dhclient and dhcp update require restart?]

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Stephen John Smoogen<smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think that the selling point is over-sold. It is true in many case
> for servers, but desktops are a much more interconnected system where
> updating something deep requires a lot of restarts.. and yes you could
> come up with a to probably deal with a good many of without a
> reboot... it is often faster to reboot the box than work out that you
> need to restart daemon-A then Y then Z and then A again

It's a rather nuanced issue; the biggest distinction I see between the
server versus (particularly unmanaged) desktops isn't the dependency
stack so much as the level of knowledge/expertise in the system
consumer.  Most system administrators take training courses that tell
them what the big list of semi human consumable UUIDs (package names)
are and they are in a better position to be aware of the tradeoffs and
when things can be restarted.  Unmanaged desktop consumers have so
such training, they just want the desktop to be reliable and work.

As for the system-reboot versus login/logout; yes, such a distinction
is something we would really like for PackageKit to have.  It would be
a bit tricky code to write to determine if an installed RPM has
changed a currently installed X desktop app, but it's something we
definitely need, and would be a great project for someone with some
understanding of X11 and how PackageKit works to jump in and work on
to improve the Linux desktop experience.