“System restart required” displayed in the middle of a long upgrade

[Anders Kaseorg]

Binary package hint: update-notifier

In the middle of a long `aptitude full-upgrade` on my Karmic amd64 system, update-notifier popped up its “System restart required” dialog box, even though aptitude had not finished the upgrade yet. This is probably due to this absurdly small timeout in update-notifier-0.78/src/update-notifier.c:

#define TIMEOUT_APT_RUN 120 /* 120 sec */

Though even if the timeout expires, update-notifier should check to see whether a package manager is still working, instead of advising the user to immediately reboot which would forcefully abort the operation in progress.

[FriedChicken (domlyons)]

I suggest the notifier should check peridically if there exist an apt-lock-file before showing the notification. It makes no sense (or even can be dangerous) showing the notification on still running apt.

[FriedChicken (domlyons)]

Or probably it's better to let the notifier check if there's a dpkg-lock-file.