On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Dan Kegel wrote: > Yes. Looking at this from a public health perspective, > the goal is to keep reducing Linux's attackable cross-section. > For now, it's probably ok if we let long-running instances of the > old version of e.g. Konqueror keep running after the update, > since most people do restart anyway after a day or two. > > Next year, who knows? Maybe suspend will be so good that nobody > logs out normally, at which point the dialogs saying "please log out > and log back in" might have to become more insistent.
Some points of information from the mac world which may be relevant: Speaking of never logging out: ~/ 799> uptime 9:41 up 27 days, 20:32, 4 users, load averages: 0.47 0.48 0.52 This laptop goes back and forth to the office with me all the time, and has been to California and back in those 27 days. I'm assuming this kind of uptime will become typical on laptop Linux as suspend/ resume becomes more robust. (When this happens and video output switching starts to Just Work, I'll switch off the Mac). On the other hand, the mac browsers now all remember their tabs. So killing them and restarting is no big deal. (Well, they forget where the back button pointed). Generally speaking the mac apps do a reasonable job on this. Most of them remind you when there's an update. The good ones know about the long-uptimes and don't wait for a restart to remind you, they just check every so often. Every user I know makes a judgment call. E.g. I'll update Adium (aka pidgin) whenever it asks, but I never install Apple updates without waiting a few days to let others be the guinea pigs. Apple stupidly requires reboots for trivial updates, so theirs tend to wait longest. Dan, I think Linus is right: there are going to be *very* few IT shops where they'll let software providers do silent mandatory update. It's a rare enough case that it hardly seems worthwhile building the machinery to support. -T _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
