packages requiring me to reboot...

[Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus]

On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 10:00 -0700, Nathanael D. Noblet wrote:
> On 12/15/2009 09:54 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
> > Does gdm entirely restart when you logout? I don't believe so. I suspect
> > you get the same result by killing X then going back to that runlevel
> > but for many many many users a reboot is going to be less error-prone.
> 
> Isn't there gdm-restart for that purpose? I don't really know, but I'm 
> just confused as to why a program that lets me login requires a reboot...
> 
> I *really* don't want to sound whiny or anything like that, or be one of 
> those that compare us to windows... but one of my favorite things from 
> years ago was that I only had to reboot with a new kernel. Now I feel 
> like I reboot every update. I mean, even the ibus stuff was stating I 
> needed a reboot. As far as I know that is used for alternative language 
> input, which I don't use, fair enough it doesn't know that. But what 
> about it needs a reboot?

Because often you cannot tell if a reboot is required or not. Consider a
shared library which gets updated. If the old version of the library
contains a security bug and you have already say ten apps running using
that library, then after the update of the library the apps will still
use the old buggy library. Only after closing and restarting the
particular apps will help. From a novice point of view you cannot expect
that he/she knows what app to close, so a restart is probably the
easiest and safest way.

Another problem may raise up if you want to update daemons. During the
update the daemon shouldn't be restarted because it might be a critical
service I'm using right now. Therefore, having a convenient way for
novices is just to say "please restart". For all others, just check what
gets updated and then decide on your own if you really need to restart
the whole system or only some apps/services and then klick on "hide this
icon" ;-)

Coming back to your fist post:
> Wouldn't it be sufficient to logout?

In some cases I would say so, but not in all.

cheers,
Stefan