On Tue, 3 Jan 2012 18:54:27 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@...> wrote:

> On Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:50:25 -0500
> Olivier Crête <tester@g.o> wrote:
> > There is a good reason for that, because in-place upgrades are
> > impossible to do safely (and RedHat customers don't accept weird
> > breakages like Gentoo users do). For example, if you replace a
> > library or even a resource file (like a .ui file for GtkBuilder),
> > the only way to make it work is to make sure that no currently
> > running application is using it. And that just can't happen with
> > system libraries like glibc or system packages like udev or dbus.
> > So the only safe way to upgrade those is to reboot.
> 
> Uhm... Unix filesystems don't work that way; you can unlink an open
> file and anything that has that file still opened will continue to
> work. You're thinking of Windows; Unix supports in-place upgrades
> just fine.

Considering that all applications keep all files open just for the fun
of it.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny