[Hamara-devel] needrestart-session - check for processes need to be restarted in user sessions

[shirish]

Hi all,
This is a package which has made my life so much smoother for last 
couple of years. I know I had promised not to talk about packages I like 
but can't resist as there are lot of goodies that need to be marketed, 
this is where debian.org really fails but anyways.

I really hope this becomes part of the new .iso, dunno if people know 
about it or not :-

[$] aptitude show needrestart needrestart-session
 

Package: needrestart
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 2.0-2
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Maintainer: Patrick Matthäi <pmatthaei at debian.org>
Architecture: all
Uncompressed Size: 203 k
Depends: perl, dpkg (>= 1.16.0), libproc-processtable-perl, 
libsort-naturally-perl, libmodule-scandeps-perl, libterm-readkey-perl,
          libmodule-find-perl
Suggests: libnotify-bin
Description: check which daemons need to be restarted after library 
upgrades needrestart checks which daemons need to be restarted after 
library upgrades. It is inspired by checkrestart from the debian-goodies 
package.

  Features:
  * supports (but does not require) systemd
  * binary blacklisting (i.e. display managers)
  * tries to detect pending kernel upgrades
  * tries to detect required restarts of interpreter based daemons 
(supports Perl, Python, Ruby)
  * fully integrated into apt/dpkg using hooks
Homepage: https://github.com/liske/needrestart

Package: needrestart-session
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 0.3-2
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Maintainer: Patrick Matthäi <pmatthaei at debian.org>
Architecture: all
Uncompressed Size: 187 k
Depends: perl, needrestart (>= 2.0), libnet-dbus-perl, 
libproc-processtable-perl, libwx-perl, wmctrl, policykit-1
Description: check for processes need to be restarted in user sessions
  needrestart checks which processes need to be restarted after library 
upgrades. needrestart-session implements a notification of user sessions
  about their obsolete processes after system upgrades.
Homepage: https://github.com/liske/needrestart-session

I have been wanting to document it on my blog for sometime now and then 
later would document it whenever it comes in hamara (probably a more 
integrated release than now)

What it basically does is shared as the last few lines of an upgrade 
happening :-


Processing triggers for menu (2.1.47) ...
D000001: ensure_diversions: same, skipping
D000001: cmpversions a='0:1.17.25' b='0:1.16' r=1
D000001: cmpversions a='0:1.17.25' b='0:1.16' r=1
D000001: ensure_diversions: new, (re)loading
D000001: cmpversions a='0:1.17.25' b='0:1.16' r=1
D000001: cmpversions a='0:1.17.25' b='0:1.16' r=1
Running kernel seems to be up-to-date.
No services need to be restarted.
User sessions:
root on /dev/tty1 is running obsolete agetty[1157]
shirish on session #1 is running obsolete pulseaudio[5501]

umm...  ok the first few lines that you see are part of my aptitude 
verbose install messages. I have upgraded few packages on my system.

The interesting part starts from

Running kernel seems to be up-to-date.
No services need to be restarted.
User sessions:
root on /dev/tty1 is running obsolete agetty[1157]
shirish on session #1 is running obsolete pulseaudio[5501]

the checker always tries to see if the kernel is up-to-date and if it is 
says that. Actually the release of the kernel version I have is a bit 
old but as that's the release in testing it passes :-

$ uname -r
 

3.16.0-4-amd64

The next part are the services that need restarting. I have deliberately 
configured it to just tell me which are the packages/libraries which 
have become obsolete due to the upgrades and not to perform those 
library upgrades if they are going to threaten the session. Hence what 
it does is just inform me of the libraries that are obsolete and still 
running in the session. I, at my convenience can go to any of the TTY's 
and just run

$sudo systemctl gdm3 restart and the 'old' gdm3 session is closed and a 
new session is started without the need to restart the system.

I do have electricity issues (as in electricity going off) otherwise 
could have pretty good uptime even with these constant rolling upgrades 
and packages I keep track of.

[$] uptime
 

  21:09:58 up 2 days,  7:19,  9 users,  load average: 0.09, 0.35, 0.62

If I get some time this week-end, then would do proper documentation for 
it and also explore it a bit more than what I have shared so far.

I have been using it since squeeze and it provide with lot of 
'buffering' especially during the squeeze to wheezy (at the endish), 
wheezy to jessie and now jessie to stretch upgrade.

So nice CLI tool to have.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org