X restart while updating?

[Adam Jackson]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 20:05 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Just ran yumex in my fc7t4 partition and while it was running the
> transaction (not sure how far along it was), the X server
> suddenly restarted. It may have actually gotten finished, because the
> rpm database gives no indication of being scrogged, but this
> is certainly behavior I never saw before. Has this happened to
> anyone else?

We've seen this a few times during the 7 cycle.  We eventually tracked
it down to:

* new version of dbus installed, adds new config file format that old
(running) version doesn't understand
* new selinux policy installed, pokes dbus to reread its config file
* old dbus is still running, fails to parse new config file, exits
* all of gnome dies with it
* X server exits because all clients have exited
* gdm restarts

No good way of fixing it, really.  I suppose you could try upgrading
dbus, restarting X, then doing the rest of the upgrade, which might
work.  Alternatively, update from runlevel 3.

- ajax