long running sessions, restarts, etc.

[Bill Nottingham]

With the move to more mobile devices (laptops, etc.), we're more likely to
have very long-running sessions that are just suspended and resumed, as
opposed to a workstation that is logged out every day.

This means that for me on rawhide, my session is often much longer-lived than my
software set, as I'll have a two-week session that is running older code
that I've long since upgraded past. Even for those on an actual release,
this can be an issue given our update stream.

For system-level services, we have the idea of try-restart on upgrades; if
the service is running, we automatically restart it on upgrade. How can
we implement this sanely for session/desktop services? For example, in
my session I see:

gvfsd
obex-client/obex-data-server
evolution-data-server
packagekitd
notification-daemon
any number of status icons (volume control, gpk, g-p-m, etc.)
... and more I'm forgetting ...

Since very few of these have state, can't we implement a framework where
they automatically get restarted on upgrade?

Bill