I'd like to chime in on this issue. I just did a point update on a remote server, and got the "must reboot for dbus" message. It is a royal pain to reboot that particular computer. Moreover, if dbus were upgraded automatically as a security patch (unattended-upgrades) there would be no person seeing that little bon-mot.
This behaviour really is unacceptable, and this bug should be elevated in priority. One technical solution would be to serialize the state of dbus and do an orderly handover to an upgraded daemon, as discussed above. I'd suggest that it might be easier to try to ensure that dbus is "crashable" or "crash-only", meaning that if the daemon is unexpectedly terminated with prejudice, it will be restarted automatically and its clients will all reestablish appropriate connections. There is a rich literature on such software, and it is in general a more convenient way to build robust systems. (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software) Stateless protocols are an example of this philosophy. However even stateful connections can be accommodated, by ensuring that clients can reconnect and re-establish the desired state when necessary. --Barak Pearlmutter <ba...@pearlmutter.net> http://barak.pearlmutter.net
