[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Reboot Cycle

[From: Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:25:04 +0300
Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:

> "ext Johannes Eickhold" <jeickhold at gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > I think it would be a good idea not to say "You can freely alternate
> > between AI 2006 and apt-get, say. Changes done to the system via apt-get
> > or dpkg are picked up by the AI 2006 without confusing it, and vice
> > versa." like [1] does, if it can cause so much trouble.
> 
> Hmm.  That sentence is pretty accurate, so why should we remove it?
> 
> It is not a guarantee, of course, that all changes to your system that
> you make with apt-get will be good ones.  There could be a warning
> about that, but I think it should be pretty obvious that when you muck
> around in your system as root that you need to be careful, no? ;)

Absolutely.

However the expectations of a typical Linux user are: apt-get upgrade
should be harmless if my sources.list points to a stable release (such
as "mistral").

I think it is a bad idea to make your system work contrary to the user's expectations.

> Then again, having a package in the official maemo mistral repository
> that will break your device is very bad, too.  "Someone should do
> something about this".

I suggested on IRC yesterday to modify the postinst script of
maemo-af-desktop (or whatever the package that restarts an important
process and causes the lifeguard to reboot) to not stop/restart the
process.  Consider gdm as an analogy in the big desktop world: I can
apt-get upgrade gdm in an xterm in a running X session, and the package
scripts do not kill/restart it in that case.

(I'd be interested in experimenting with this if I had a spare Nokia 770 that I wasn't afraid of breaking.)

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
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