Comment 2 for bug 902856

https://launchpad.net/changeup is a solution to exactly this problem, though it is not yet usable, as I haven't really had any time to poke at it further, and so it fell to the back burner. I'll try to look at it again soon.

In the mean time, I think the status quo is acceptable; which is to say "do nothing and require the user to log out/in, or manually restart if they are technical enough to know how" to get new running code. They are going to have to log out and back in, or restart apps, with a large number of updates anyway.

Another useful thing to do, would be to make the dmedia-service be on-demand, rather than running all the time. This way, it will likely not be running if not in use, when an update gets installed. And having it not running forever helps save battery life as well.