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.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh