System design flaw for GUI applications for package management

[Ivan Čukić]

If an updated or newly installed package (such as the last libpam update in Gutsy) is requesting a restart of kdm/gdm (amongst other services), adept is terminated, thus terminating the update (dist-upgrade) process. The only way to achieve this kind of update is to go to terminal and do the apt-get dist-upgrade (or any other alternative) from there.

The solution would be to move the actual updating process to a console service (parented by init) so that if the GUI is terminated, it can continue normally.

I presume that synaptic and other GUI package managers have the same design flaw.

[Gabriel Ambuehl (gabriel-ambuehl)]

This even happens when you run CLI updates from an X11 based terminal (for much the same reasons).

I don't think kdm/gdm should be among the services to be restarted by default.

[Ivan Čukić (ivan-cukic)]

Yes it does, but I think it's a smaller problem because people who know how to use CLI updates would know what is the problem and would bypass it easily :)

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

I am pretty sure that Adept 3.0 in Kubuntu Intrepid handles conf prompts like these correctly.
Please reopen this bug if this turns out to be false.