Bug#771122: restarting the journal breaks other services

[Martin Pitt]

Petr Baudis [2014-12-04 16:16 +0100]:
> Can't this be handled like a glibc (nss) upgrade is, using a debconf
> prompt that suggests restarting other services recursively?

In theory, anything is possible :-) However, that first assumes that
all the affected services actually support that properly; e. g. it's
not at all obvious how to start NetworkManager's DHCP client from
"outside" without hardcoding a lot of knowledge about NM's internal
package structure. And restarting the entire NetworkManager is too
disruptive.

TBH I don't think we can aim for this complexity in Jessie; it's very
unlikely that we get that right at the first or second shot.

> Even if infeasible, it would be good to add a debconf prompt to
> systemd restarts triggered by upgrades if they are known to break
> stuff; but maybe that's a given?

My personal opinion is that the fewer "unbreak my machine" debconf
prompts we have, the better; in many cases like these they are just a
poor excuse. It's like "we as the developers don't know what to do
here, so we pushed this question to the user who will of course have
absolutely no clue about it; but we can then shift the blame to the
user if stuff breaks".

If we can't safely restart the journal, let's just not do it. There
are some plans upstream how to make it possible (very far away from
"easy" though), so until then let's just stay at the safe side.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)