Bug#919509: systemd packaging does not touch /var/run/reboot-required

[Karl O. Pinc]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 19:55:59 +0100
Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:44:28 -0600 "Karl O. Pinc" <kop at meme.com>
> wrote:

> > systemd security updates to stable
> > systemd (232-25+deb9u8) stretch-security; urgency=high
> > systemd (232-25+deb9u7) stretch-security; urgency=high
> > required reboot to take effect, but /var/run/reboot-required
> > was not `touch`ed.  Therefore the unattended-upgrades
> > package did not notify the user that a reboot is required.
> > (There were related upgrades to udev and other packages.)
> > 
> > There are probably many systems which installed the
> > upgrade automatically but did not reboot and so the
> > patch did not take effect.
> > 
> > "The Internet" says that it is the postinst script which
> > should touch /var/run/reboot-required.
> >   
> 
> This should probably be /run/reboot-required, /var/run is a symlink
> to /run.

Yes.  See latest debian policy doc patch at:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919507

> That said, an update of the systemd package does not strictly require
> a reboot of the system. We do reexec PID 1 and restart all binaries
> (besides logind), so I'm a bit undecided if we should actually trigger
> that message or not.

If systemd restarts all of its processes which are affected
by package upgrade then the only reason to require a restart would
be if some changes in new systemd packages required a restart
of non-systemd components.  So maybe this is a non-bug.

Regards,

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein