On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerq...@0pointer.de> wrote:
> I mean, have you ever tried to upgrade firefox while running firefox? If
> you did, you know how awfully wrong that goes... [1]

I run Mozilla's nightly builds and receive updates every day. They
disrupt nothing because Mozilla has built infrastructure to make that
possible. Firefox must be restarted for the updates to take effect,
which is when it does the actual swapout of the staged files, but the
restart is basically just a window flickering— tabs retain their
state, including forms— in fact to prove the point I manually
triggered it while writing this email.

This is the direction Fedora should be heading in, if not quite as
non-disruptive as what firefox does... and it's not that far off
because with the exception of the recently written desktop
infrastructure the system largely already support non-disruptive
updates. By making updates regularly require reboots the incentive to
bridge the gap is reduced and the expectations of a clean enviroment
will increase until a rebootless update is as inconceivable in Fedora
as it is in Windows.

By making updates regularly require reboots you put users in an
adversarial relationship with updates. Rather than being seen as
something that helps them, updates will be seen as something that get
in their way. Many will turn them off completely if you give them an
option to do so.  We don't have to speculate about the long term
consequences of this path because we can already see it in the Windows
world: e.g. On several occasions I have seen windows update disrupt
presentations because the speaker was talking to the audience and
didn't react fast enough to the snooze button on the mandatory updates
they've been deferring.
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