Comment 18 for bug 1033226

First of all, Matthew, thank you for actually working on this!

However, the following "fresh" idea might be based on a lack of knowledge about a change in the state of affairs of Linux software (possibly attributable to sky-rocketing complexity), but except for upgrades to large swaths of core system components - i.e. distribution-level upgrades - I have never, for the past 14 years, seen an upgrade that warranted forcing the user to reboot (though some can, beneficially, prompt a recommendation of restarting a service or some such, which dpkg and friends handle very well). GUI upgrades might very well require a restart of X, but that's about it, so perhaps we should work on developing functionality for dpkg and friends to queue those pending an X restart (and then, possibly, queue core lib upgrades pending this reboot that you seem to want to force upon people instead)...

Thus, I can, at most, agree to a message to the effect of "Due to the nature of the just completed upgrade, we recommend that you reboot afterwards - or take measures equivalent to a reboot as far as <package> is concerned."

This could, in answer to your false dilemma above, be supplemented by a "Since your last reboot, N package upgrades have prompted such a recommendation."

This should, of course, only be displayed in connection with upgrades that actually prompts a recommendation for a reboot, i.e. most certainly not at every single subsequent reboot!