D-Bus upgrade problems in Debian

[Matthew Johnson]

Dear all (with my Debian hat on),

There is currently an outstanding RC bug against the D-Bus package in
Debian which I feel could do with some input from upstream.

The bug in question is #495257[0]. The current package upgrade from
current stable to the current development version causes D-Bus to be
restarted, which you will all know causes bad things to happen.

There are two things I'd like comment from people here about. Firstly,
there are a number of suggestions about how to make restarts of the
system bus without a reboot work. There is a lack of official D-Bus
policy on this and whether we every plan to support it. I suspect that
for the release after this there will be a big push from Debian to make
all D-Bus-using applications survive a bus restart or to make D-Bus able
to seamlessly restart without dropping connections.

Secondly, we have a technical problem implementing the obvious solution
(don't restart it on upgrades) in that the currently installed package
in stable has a prerm script which stops D-Bus (using the normal
initscript template for packages gives you this) and this is always run
first during any package upgrade, so it is not possible for the new
package to prevent this from happening. Do you have any suggestions as
to how we can (given this exists) provide a relatively smooth upgrade
from the current release to the next one which we are preparing at the
moment.

Feel free to respond to this directly to the bug[1] or just follow up
here and I'll collate the responses.

Thanks,
Matt

0. http://bugs.debian.org/495257
1. 495257 at bugs.debian.org
-- 
www.matthew.ath.cx
D-Bus Java
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