Author: Alan Pope Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Restarting upgraded packages
On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 09:42:43AM +0000, john lewis wrote: > I often wonder how important it is to restart a newly upgraded
> package.
>
You really should get out more John.
> Firefox comes up with a warning to restart any running instances
> after an upgrade as does a kernel upgrade.
>
Yeah, the firefox application is somewhat modular. The user interface and other components are spread over a bunch of files. If you
already have Firefox running and you update it then some of those components will have been changed. Depending on what changed it can
make the UI in Firefox unstable, so they recommend you restart
> But how about things like xserver-xorg-core or konsole (2 packages
> upgraded this morning), do they just run the upgraded package
> seamlessly?
>
"It depends" is my carefully considered and detailed technical response.
For a simple single-executable application like konsole then I suspect you will just need to close it and start it again (if it was
running) to get the new features (or security fixes or whatever), for something like a daemon it normally gets restarted by the upgrade
anyway, for bigger stuff like xorg then I guess you need to restart in the same way you would for konsole/firefox.
