[arch-general] Shouldn't pacman restart dovecot after update?

[Peter Lewis]

On Tuesday 03 Aug 2010 at 09:28 Magnus Therning wrote:
> > No useless "little 1-line notes" only ment for braindead users..  i
> > only want to see what i need to see.
> 
> I doubt I'm as knowledgeable on Linux systems as you, so I'd rather
> like seeing a bit more messages than you need to see.

I have to admit that the recent dovecot update caught me out too for a few 
minutes, until I realised that I'd had no new email for an eerie amount of 
time.

But I don't think it's quite as simple as "there shouldn't be messages like 
this" or that it's about "linux experience". In my experience, some packages 
are affected differently than others when they are upgraded while running. 

Here are three different examples in my anecdotal experience (details may be 
incorrect):

- Dovecot: a running instance appears to totally break and need restarting.

- KDE: session needs restarting to run the new desktop, but the old one will 
carry on running happily, possibly causing the occasional problem. Newly 
launched apps are the new version (can lead to further problems).

- Firefox: everything seems fine to carry on fine. Restart the instance at 
your leisure.

With a particular package, you've no idea which category this falls into. 
Sure, you could apply the safest approach of always restarting everything 
that's upgraded, but that's not always practical. IMO it would be nice to have 
short indicators when something is likely to severely break until restarted. I 
don't think that's overkill, it's just helpful.

Cheers,

Pete.