Does firefox upgrades need some pre/post install love to close and restart firefox during upgrades

[Kevin DeKorte]

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On 11/17/09 09:46, Todd Denniston wrote:
> Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote, On 11/17/2009 03:07 AM:
>> First of all this is not the right place to discuss this..
>>
>> Secondly if an update of an application requires that application to be
>> restarted after being updated, the updating application should just
>> notify the user that there is an update to an application he's currently
>> using that requires him to quit that application for the updater to
>> proceed updating that application. The updater should simply ask him to
>> finish his work then quit the application he's using and rerun updating.
>>
>> Just my 2 cents..
>>
>> JBG
>>
> 
> By the time the rpm is being processed, it is too late to have a truly
> interactive wait: right?
> 
> how about this ugly hack description/pseudocode :
> in the prescript
> if {running instances of Firefox found}
> then
>    hook each Firefox instance and \
>     point them at file:///usr/share/FFwarning/FFwarning.html
>    #give an active user half a chance to drop FF.
>    sleep 15
> fi
> 
> 
> 
> file:///usr/share/FFwarning.html will contain a text warning message and
> a countdown.
> the countdown might be implemented as a javascript or as a timed forced
> load of the next page.
> The text warning gives the user notice that they have 15...14... to
> shutdown Firefox before rpm replaces the running binary and risks all
> the mentioned data corruption/loss.

The whole problem with monitoring for a new firefox is that it takes a
lot of unnecessary CPU to look for a change that may happen only once a
month or less. So if restarting of firefox is desired when it is
upgraded we need to do it in a way that is VERY efficient. Perhaps
creating a plugin that listens for a dbus event that is generated by the
pre/post install script of the firefox package.

I'm not convinced that having firefox crash is all that catastrophic. As
the web is designed to be stateless so you should be able to restart any
process on a website that you were doing prior to the crash.

Kevin



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