long running sessions, restarts, etc.

Jeroen van Meeuwen kanarip at kanarip.com
Tue Sep 29 19:57:03 UTC 2009


On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:20:01 -0400, David Zeuthen <davidz at redhat.com>
wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 18:46 +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
>>  For this reason among others I think we should move to installing
>> updates immediately before logout/reboot.
> 
> Completely agree. FWIW, this is what most mobile "computers" such as the
> iPhone and Android does. And, for the record, how OS X works too (unless
> the only update is for an application like iTunes). They can of course
> do this because they don't issue updates almost _every day_ (or what
> feels like every day, anyway) like we do in Fedora.
> 

The major difference obviously being, that OS X is not a version of rawhide
with a release number attached to it. It is more like, dare I say it, RHEL
(in that aspect).

The ultimate problem though is not the number of updates. One can cron a
yum -y update every 5 minutes without it (euh, the updates being applied)
interrupting (m)any of the services or applications running on the system
(as long as they are running, that is).

The ultimate challenge is; how, if at all, can we make sure a running
daemon picks up the new blobs so that we can seamlessly update/upgrade,
especially with regards to "i'm in ur board eating your keez" security
issues.

Making the release cycle longer (including the development cycle) works two
ways;

1) you have more time to perform QA
2) everytime you perform QA the amount of changes is going to be bigger (53
features in 6 months anyone?)

Also, the militant attitude of Fedora against static linking works two
ways;

1) my blob runs on its own
1a) ignoring updates (security fixes anyone?) to the statically linked
other blobs. Weeeee!
1b) putting the load on all packagers of blobs depending on blob, and/or
vice-versa
2) my blob runs with the help of other blobs

And, to not continue on why it would be bad, how much RAM does your Android
have? Your iPhone? Your HTC X7500? Your HTC Touch? Is it... scarse?

Still though, the interesting question is how we can ship software that
doesn't need as many updates... like you said ;-)

-- Jeroen




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