What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Nils Philippsen]

On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 11:27 -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 7:04 AM, Michal Schmidt <mschmidt at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 9 Dec 2008 01:25:40 +0100
> > Robert Scheck <robert at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >
> >> [PackageKit] kills my Firefox nicely during package updating,
> >> well-well done.
> >
> > Running instances of Firefox always break when the Firefox package is
> > being updated. It does not matter what you use for the update (rpm,
> > yum, PK). This is not PackageKit's fault.
> 
> In general, any software can break when a running copy has its files
> swapped out from under it.  XULRunner-based apps exacerbate this flaw
> in the package system because they use versioned directories.
> 
> But it's not Firefox's fault either.  Think about icons, glade files,
> etc. that might be included in software.
> 
> It's something that really needs to be fixed in yum/rpm.  Windows has
> a notion of "update this file after reboot", which might be the way to
> go.

Somehow delaying file updates until after a reboot sounds yucky to me,
not only because merely quitting firefox and starting it again would
help in this instance. Perhaps we should find a way where yum/PK would
flag packages which are known to have these issues to the user in the
form of "updating these packages requires you to restart firefox/..."
akin to how we hint users to logout and back in (e.g. update of basic
GNOME packages) or reboot the machine (kernel).

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
PGP fingerprint:      C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011