On 18 May 2014 21:42, Robert Collins <robertc@robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On 17 May 2014 09:07, Seth Arnold <seth.arnold@canonical.com> wrote:
>
>> This is something we could provide to the developers as a simple API.
>> onApplicationUpdate: high-level signal or a simple C function to install
>> the inotify listener that can signal the application's main event loop
>> when appropriate. We probably even already have a file in every package
>> that could serve as the inotify sentinal.
>>
>> That way, applications that are brittle about having their resources
>> updated 'from underneath' can be prepared to do something about it.
>
> It might be better to flip the logic around and assume most user
> applications are brittle - refuse to update unless all the user
> applications running have marked themselves as being update
> ready/update aware.
AFAIK the wast majority of applications are not brittle - the
application gets fully loaded into memory at start and after that you
can delete or replace the binary and it will still work fine. If you
load icons or other resources into you app a while after the app is
started and the upgrade removes or renames them, then that operation
might fail, but if the name stays the same, then there is no issue.
Even if external apps and modules are called, as long as the used API
or ABI stays the same upgrade should have no negative effects. What
makes Forefox and LibreOffice special is, as far as I understand,
dynamic loading of compile-time-version-locked binary code components
on many common operations.
There might be something in modern GUI frameworks that changes this
which I might not be aware of, but so far the experience has been that
almost all apps just continue working fine.
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs mailto:aigarius@debian.org
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