[arch-general] pam upgrade and systemd

[Troy Engel]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Jens Adam <jra at byte.cx> wrote:
>
> information. If you're upgrading a bunch of packages (your usual -Syu)
> with 'pam' being one of many and it's not echoing any hint or warning
> about a soname change, well, duh. PAM is such an essential library

...coupled with the fact I work (real job) on
RHEL/CentOS/Debian/Ubuntu servers where this doesn't happen often due
to vendor design - glibc and pam upgrades tend to never be a problem
in these. I come back to using my laptops running Arch and have to
switch mental gears where latest-and-greatest upgrades break a running
system and reboots are the norm, something I just tend to forget as a
rolling release.

I did a little debugging in VirtualBox and could get systemd to reload
it (systemctl daemon-reexec, daemon-reload didn't release it) but more
lsof shows everything from lightdm to cupsd to gdbus has the old
libpam.so DEL in memory, so while restarting everything would work we
just reboot for convenience. Is what it is.

It would be kinda cool if we had a fundamental design from the ground
up where a library upgrade could signal a system-wide HUP to reload --
that would have to have been done years ago though to set the paradigm
for all binaries to follow, no way we could retrofit the Linux
ecosphere at this point and get all userspace to comply. Some distros
have attempted to tackle this with scripts[1][2] of various sorts, but
none of it bulletproof or distro agnostic.

-te

[1] http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum-utils.git;a=blob_plain;f=needs-restarting.py;hb=HEAD
[2] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/debian-goodies.git/tree/checkrestart