It would appear that on Oct 14, Thomas Bächler did say:
My recommendations: 1) If you are upgrading your desktop environment, exit your session, quit your login manager and upgrade from the text console. I advise to run pacman -Sywu from the desktop and when the download finishes, run pacman -Su from the text console.
OK, pardon my intrusion, but NOW I'm curious... I can understand the advantage of running "pacman -Su" from a text console (By which I don't mean using <ctrl>+<alt>+<F[1-6]> while the gui is still running.). It just makes sense, especially when pacman is expressly not a gui app. I can also understand that it might be better to run "pacman -Sywu" first as a separate operation. But why run the latter from the gui???
2) Put all kernel-related packages on --ignore until you are planning to reboot. If you are not going to reboot, a kernel update will have no effect anyway.
As a general rule I always reboot after any "pacman -Su" operation. If I wasn't prepared to reboot, I wouldn't upgrade my system. -- | --- ___ | <0> <-> Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | ^ J(tWdy)P | ~\___/~ <<jtwdyp@ttlc.net>>