[Pkg-systemd-maintainers] Bug#719527: include whether machine was rebooted after upgrading in the bugscript

[Michael Stapelberg]

Package: systemd
Version: 204-2
Severity: normal

During DebConf13, I talked a bit more with Lennart about the upgrade
process of systemd. He mentioned that updates without rebooting are
generally not tested and not guaranteed to work. Regardless of how we
actually encourage users to reboot their machine after upgrading to a
new systemd version, he suggested the following:

The bugscript should include whether the machine was rebooted since the
last systemd upgrade. This would allow us to discard issues that might
be caused by people not rebooting. A simple way of tracking this
information is creating a file in /run on upgrades and checking whether
that file exists in the bugscript.

I would’ve gone ahead and implemented that, but it’s unfortunately not
straight-forward, since we don’t get the current (or old) and new
version in postinst maintscripts. I can see the following options:

1) Just touch a file in /run uncoditionally on each postinst run. This
   would introduce false-positives when a user is running systemd 204
   and runs dpkg -i systemd_204-2.deb again (or uses apt-get install
   --reinstall).

2) Put the package version number into postinst by using sed +
   postinst.in or some mechanism like that.

Are there any objections to option 2?