Comment by throwaway2048
7 years ago
Not all applications need to restart, most updates will effect things that are not the running application (Office suite/webbrowser/game/whatever) ? Meanwhile your entire system has to restart.
7 years ago
Not all applications need to restart, most updates will effect things that are not the running application (Office suite/webbrowser/game/whatever) ? Meanwhile your entire system has to restart.
"Most updates" won't affect running applications? What DLLs do you imagine "most updates" affect that are not in use by MS Office, Chrome, games, etc.? Pretty much everything I can imagine would be used all over the system, not merely coincidentally by desktop applications, but especially by desktop applications... if anything, it'd usually be the other way around, where some background services wouldn't need to be killed (because they sometimes only depend on a handful of DLLs), but many applications would (which can have insane dependency graphs). But both applications and background services also use IPC to interact with other processes (sometimes internally through Windows DLLs, not necessarily explicitly coded by them) which could well mean that they would need to be restarted if those processes need to be updated...
> What DLLs do you imagine "most updates" affect that are not in use by MS Office, Chrome, games, etc.?
Yeah, you can't update libc this way.
But outside of a short list of DLLs that are used by everything, files are mostly specific to a single program, and 90% of my programs are trivial to update by virtue of the fact that they aren't running.
And most of the background services on both linux and windows can be restarted transparently.
> But outside of a short list of DLLs that are used by everything, files are mostly specific to a single program, and 90% of my programs are trivial to update by virtue of the fact that they aren't running.
Are we talking about the same thing? We're talking about Windows updates, not Chrome updates or something. Windows doesn't force you to reboot when programs update themselves. It forces you to reboot when it updates itself. Which generally involves updating system DLLs that are used all over the place.
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