On Wed, 05 Jul 2017 at 09:24:51 +0000, sam penny wrote: > A message "A reboot is required to replace the running dbus-daemon." was shown > and /var/run/reboot-required was touched, but /var/run/reboot-required.pgks > remained unchanged (absent in this case)
Which package reads that file? Is its desired content documented anywhere? I'm happy to change the postinst to append to it, but I need to know what the "API" is. I'm considering #867263 to refer to the feature request "please append <something> to /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs". > As a secondary issue, I would vote for a fix for > https://bugs.debian.org/805449 > but if we do need a reboot, it should be clear why to facilitate an informed > decision about when the reboot should be scheduled Sorry, you do not get a vote on this: everyone involved agrees that #805449 is a bug, but there is no shortage of bug-fixing and other work that people can spend their time on. The people who know the code well enough that they could solve #805449 have assessed the cost/benefit and decided to work on something else instead (you can tell this has happened because otherwise, there would be a proposed change to fix it). The only form of "vote" that is useful here would be to propose a tested solution, or hire a consultant to do so. However, the upstream maintainers of dbus would still need to review it and be confident that it was not a net backward step, which is itself a significant investment of time. Consensus among the upstream maintainers of dbus is that fixing #805449 is too difficult to be feasible. It would be a large amount of rarely-tested, error-prone code, and bugs in that code (which are more or less inevitable) could easily result in the dbus-daemon crashing or becoming non-functional, most likely requiring an immediate (unscheduled) boot to recover. Requiring an immediate reboot because a bug brings down the dbus-daemon seems considerably worse than requiring a reboot at a time convenient to you, so #805449 is the lesser evil. Of course, in an ideal world, there would be a bug-free solution to #805449, but we are very far from that ideal world. > As a tertiary issue, but I can't work out where to report it (pointers > welcome!) the contents of the reboot-required.pkgs file in general could > really > do with some more information about the package versions and the timing of the > request dbus cannot solve this. Please identify which package defines the contents of this file and send any feature requests there, as a separate report. > (eg. if if the update fixes a typo in a rare error > message but dbus can't be replaced without a reboot, that reboot is going to > wait until I have a better reason to reboot - if it fixes a major security > issue, that reboot will happen as soon as reasonably possible) dbus provides approximately this information in /usr/share/doc/dbus/changelog.Debian.gz, including the urgency field (normally medium, sometimes low or high). The same is true for every other Debian package. Doing something with that information is a feature request for something involved in the package update process, rather than for the package being updated. If you are running testing/unstable, try apt-listchanges - perhaps it already does what you need. If you are running stable/oldstable, in addition to the availability of apt-listchanges, updates are announced on the debian-security-announce and debian-announce mailing lists, and every update is likely to be important (because we wouldn't spend the time and take the regression risk of doing a stable update if it wasn't important). If in doubt, reboot as soon as is convenient anyway, whether dbus tells you to or not. Regards, smcv
