On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen <roz...@geekspace.com> wrote: > Your comments beg the question, "*do* HAL and D-Bus ever actually need > to be restarted" (and, if so, why?).
As far as I know, they need to be restarted on two conditions: (1) Some HAL/DBus config changes (2) Software changes (to HAL/DBus, or a library they use) > * What should X applications do if the X server needs to be restarted? Well, I don't really grok HAL and DBus usage, but it would seem to me that there's a lot less state involved in a HAL or DBus client vs an X client. DBus is a message passing agent. If it restarts, the only state that is lost is the connection to it. So in the client, if the attempt-to-read-next-message routine fails, call the attempt-to-connect routine again. If the attempt-to-connect fails, the appropriate course of action depends on the application. Perhaps continue operation, attempting a reconnect periodically; perhaps notify the user; perhaps cough and die. HAL identifies hardware, and also reports on changes in hardware. Changes in hardware are reported via DBus. A restart of hald does not imply a change in hardware. So all your old hardware state is still good. And for future changes in hardware, see the DBus reconnect algorithm above. In contrast, X contains all of the UI elements for a program. There's a lot of complex, nested state there. If it was just a simple question of a connection to the X server, then I would still say the attempt-to-reconnect algorithm was the right approach to take. But if all that state goes away, too, that's rather more complicated. Maybe there's more going on here than I'm aware of. Even if it *was* a case of the client application reasonably needs to be restarted, then that means the client applications need to be restarted. It doesn't mean *everything* needs to be restarted. Upgrading my X server just means I need to log out and back in again. I don't have to reboot the whole computer. > but what's your position on the `programs losing file-data in > system-crashes with ext4' issue that came up back in March? :) > (cf. <http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/2031231>) http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1157269&cid=27161797 >> Can anyone recommend a Free, Unix-like operating system that >> supports a wide variety of hardware? That used to be Linux, but it >> now fails on the second item. > > Does this mean you're not coming to the Linux-UG party, after all? I haven't had time to reinstall my OS yet. ;-) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
