Ubuntu
dbus package

dbus should not require a reboot on every upgrade

Bug #399368 reported by Nelson Elhage
18
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
dbus (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
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Bug Description

Binary package hint: dbus

The 'dbus' postinst script sends a reboot notification (via notify-reboot-required) on every upgrade of the package. Requiring unnecessary reboots is annoying and creates a poor experience for users. Instead of requiring a reboot for every new version, dbus should conditionalize on versions containing security problems or other particularly important fixes, and only request a reboot for those upgrades.

Revision history for this message
Nelson Elhage (nelhage) wrote :

I don't think it is accurate to characterize this as a duplicate of bug #399676. While it is true that solving that bug would make it possible to close this bug, they are not the same issue. My claim is that, as long as dbus does not support stateful restarts, it is still unnecessarily annoying to blindly request a reboot on every upgrade. Instead, the init script should test for specific versions where it is known to be particularly important (for e.g. security reasons) that the user upgrade soon, and only then present an annoying reboot notification.

Revision history for this message
Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott) wrote : Re: [Bug 399368] Re: dbus should not require a reboot on every upgrade

On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 14:32 +0000, Nelson Elhage wrote:

> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 399676 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/399676
>
> I don't think it is accurate to characterize this as a duplicate of bug
> #399676. While it is true that solving that bug would make it possible
> to close this bug, they are not the same issue. My claim is that, as
> long as dbus does not support stateful restarts, it is still
> unnecessarily annoying to blindly request a reboot on every upgrade.
> Instead, the init script should test for specific versions where it is
> known to be particularly important (for e.g. security reasons) that the
> user upgrade soon, and only then present an annoying reboot
> notification.
>
Which would mean that for every such release, the developer would forget
to do so.

This also wouldn't work *across* releases, e.g. if you update to a minor
release - how would you know that you actually updated across a major
release.

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>

Revision history for this message
Nelson Elhage (nelhage) wrote : Re: [Bug 399368] Re: dbus should not require a reboot on every upgrade

> This also wouldn't work *across* releases, e.g. if you update to a minor
> release - how would you know that you actually updated across a major
> release.

The postinst script gets the previously-installed version as an
argument, so you can conditionalize on that. The postinst would need
to contain logic to the effect of

if $PREV_VERSION < [Last important release]; then
   notify-reboot-required
fi

Which would only need to be updated for release that were deemed
"important" enough to request a reboot.

The 'initscripts' and 'ifupdown' packages contain similar logic to
request a reboot only on upgrades from particular old versions.

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