packages requiring me to reboot - semi-off -topic response

[David Timms]

On 12/17/2009 08:38 AM, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 16:30 -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> 
>> too. My own preference would be a more discriminating dialog
>> that offers three possibilities: 'do nothing', 'bounce the 
>> service/application' and 'reboot'.
> 
> Yup, +1
Bounce the application would be really cool for eg firefox, thunderbird,
that continue to work, but some things sort of don't (like new popups
dont open and so forth). In doing so the application would need to
return to the identical locations, arrangements that it was bounced from.

And really, the above shouldn't be difficult for a computer to do:
- have window, pos,size, doc open, caret position and so on, even those
pesky web forms with unsubmitted data and so on. Make it part of the
freedesktop standards - an app forcibly closed or ?disappears shall
reopen as if nothing changed ! (although firefox multi-tab and working
out which tab not to reopen after a crash is a good game).

Make open documents files etc, be always stored immediately on change
with snapshots at each save to disk, few minutes of operation etc. Make
it like paper, but actually better, you know: what is written on paper
doesn't mysteriously disappear when an update or a power failure, or app
crash occurs, nor does it disappear from where you left it.

I think the above scenario for user apps would seem to be a reasonable
goal. On the other hand, services are not so clear cut. If I'm an
external user logged into the web service, filling a form, I don't
expect even momentary downtime to cause me to lose information I'm
entering, or corrupt a file I have open / editing on network share
(though see the works better than paper description).

In the first example, would it make sense for the web server to start
all new processes using the new updated code, while existing users stay
connected to the existing instance, until these timeout/logout and no
user's connection is using the old code.

When a reboot is really needed, a PK dialog could inform of the need,
and ask when that could occur (do at 4:30 am tueday morning)

ps: did gnome desktop regain the feature of autologin and rerun apps on
desktop capability of pre f-10 ?