[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#867263: dbus: /var/log/reboot-required.pgks not updated when /var/log/reboot-required is touched

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 05 Jul 2017 at 09:24:51 +0000, sam penny wrote:
> A message "A reboot is required to replace the running dbus-daemon." was shown
> and /var/run/reboot-required was touched, but /var/run/reboot-required.pgks
> remained unchanged (absent in this case)

Which package reads that file? Is its desired content documented
anywhere? I'm happy to change the postinst to append to it, but I need
to know what the "API" is.

I'm considering #867263 to refer to the feature request "please append
<something> to /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs".

> As a secondary issue, I would vote for a fix for https://bugs.debian.org/805449
> but if we do need a reboot, it should be clear why to facilitate an informed
> decision about when the reboot should be scheduled

Sorry, you do not get a vote on this: everyone involved agrees that
#805449 is a bug, but there is no shortage of bug-fixing and other work
that people can spend their time on. The people who know the code well
enough that they could solve #805449 have assessed the cost/benefit
and decided to work on something else instead (you can tell this has
happened because otherwise, there would be a proposed change to fix it).

The only form of "vote" that is useful here would be to propose a tested
solution, or hire a consultant to do so. However, the upstream maintainers
of dbus would still need to review it and be confident that it was not a
net backward step, which is itself a significant investment of time.

Consensus among the upstream maintainers of dbus is that fixing
#805449 is too difficult to be feasible. It would be a large amount of
rarely-tested, error-prone code, and bugs in that code (which are more
or less inevitable) could easily result in the dbus-daemon crashing or
becoming non-functional, most likely requiring an immediate (unscheduled)
boot to recover. Requiring an immediate reboot because a bug brings down
the dbus-daemon seems considerably worse than requiring a reboot at a
time convenient to you, so #805449 is the lesser evil.

Of course, in an ideal world, there would be a bug-free solution to
#805449, but we are very far from that ideal world.

> As a tertiary issue, but I can't work out where to report it (pointers
> welcome!) the contents of the reboot-required.pkgs file in general could really
> do with some more information about the package versions and the timing of the
> request

dbus cannot solve this. Please identify which package defines the
contents of this file and send any feature requests there, as a
separate report.

> (eg. if if the update fixes a typo in a rare error
> message but dbus can't be replaced without a reboot, that reboot is going to
> wait until I have a better reason to reboot - if it fixes a major security
> issue, that reboot will happen as soon as reasonably possible)

dbus provides approximately this information in
/usr/share/doc/dbus/changelog.Debian.gz, including the urgency field
(normally medium, sometimes low or high). The same is true for every
other Debian package. Doing something with that information is a feature
request for something involved in the package update process, rather
than for the package being updated.

If you are running testing/unstable, try apt-listchanges - perhaps it
already does what you need.

If you are running stable/oldstable, in addition to the availability of
apt-listchanges, updates are announced on the debian-security-announce
and debian-announce mailing lists, and every update is likely to be
important (because we wouldn't spend the time and take the regression
risk of doing a stable update if it wasn't important). If in doubt,
reboot as soon as is convenient anyway, whether dbus tells you to or not.

Regards,
    smcv