Comment 26 for bug 1033226

Matthew: It's really great to see you put so much work into this - though we may disagree, you are actually doing something!

I'd have to say that the upper left version appeals to me the most, although I disagree a bit with the phrasing. To the best of my knowledge, most *nix software doesn't need a reboot (I think we agree on that), but this is mainly a result of the *nix VM model of very limited abilities for processes to share memory, meaning that .so files will be loaded into memory by the process, and then stay there, unaltered, until the process terminates, meaning that running processes will happily utilise the pre-upgrade version until otherwise terminated, and then switch to using the new one upon restart.

Obviously, there are situations where it makes a lot of sense to switch to the new version (especially for security fixes), but in the vast majority of cases, a simple restart of the applications relying on those libs is all it takes, which is why dpkg is made to routinely restart dependent daemons.

Thus, the need for a real reboot of the actual machine is then reserved for kernel updates addressing vulnerabilities, or massively restructuring changes to other sorts of very basic things like major upgrades to glibc or some-such.

Furthermore, I have yet to see a .deb file that specifies things to be run upon the next reboot only "in order to finish the installation". This is a direct result of what I describe above, and one of the oddities of the Windows world to rely on post-reboot configuration (I'm sure that there are reasons that seemed logical at the time).

Therefore, I would, as said, recommend the upper left one, but with the text changed to something akin to "In order to take full advantage of this or earlier upgrades, a reboot is recommended." and then limit the packages that suggest a reboot to an absolute minimum.

Best regards and thank you for your work,

Sune