Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 08:09:09AM -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
>> Colin Walters wrote:
>>> Another thing to keep in mind that immediately post-installation there
>>> are going to be updates, which will at a minimum need desktop reset
>>> (fast reboot experience), or more likely system restart.
>> I don't exactly get this.  I might understand some negligible things. But 
>> historically I've often done
>>
>> -normal install, reboot
>>
>> -booted, logged in using everying, then a massive yum update, then I'd  
>> wait till it was absolutely convenient to logout of the desktop or reboot
>>
>> In fact, when I felt I needed to do it before my convenience, I generally 
>> regarded it as a pretty horrible bug.
> 
> I thought that preupgrade is supposed to help ease this discomfort.
> It deals pretty well with combining the base release of the new distro
> with package updates, and you reboot when you're ready.  There's
> nothing in preupgrade to deal with repartitioning, though, it's purely
> for an in-place upgrade.  Downloading happens in the background, and
> you reboot when you're ready to run the transaction.  May not cover
> all the cases you're looking at, but worth noting.

Yes, I do see how preupgrade does ease that discomfort.

The RebootlessInstaller's use-case is only about installations, not 
upgrades.  Though... (envisioning lots of future work that I'm not that 
interested in doing myself)

peace...

-dmc