[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#805449: Amplification

[Barak A. Pearlmutter]

I'd like to chime in on this issue. I just did a point update on a
remote server, and got the "must reboot for dbus" message. It is a
royal pain to reboot that particular computer. Moreover, if dbus were
upgraded automatically as a security patch (unattended-upgrades) there
would be no person seeing that little bon-mot.

This behaviour really is unacceptable, and this bug should be elevated
in priority.

One technical solution would be to serialize the state of dbus and do
an orderly handover to an upgraded daemon, as discussed above. I'd
suggest that it might be easier to try to ensure that dbus is
"crashable" or "crash-only", meaning that if the daemon is
unexpectedly terminated with prejudice, it will be restarted
automatically and its clients will all reestablish appropriate
connections. There is a rich literature on such software, and it is in
general a more convenient way to build robust systems. (ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software) Stateless protocols
are an example of this philosophy. However even stateful connections
can be accommodated, by ensuring that clients can reconnect and
re-establish the desired state when necessary.

--Barak Pearlmutter <barak at pearlmutter.net> http://barak.pearlmutter.net