Bug#1110221: release-notes: Desktop restarts during upgrade

On Sat, 2 Aug 2025 16:14:35 +0100 Justin B Rye 
<[email protected]> wrote:
 > Richard Lewis wrote:
 > >>> This can be triggered if you specifically tell needrestart to restart
 > >>> processes that are usually left un-restarted, but the package
 > >>> needrestart probably isn't even installed on your machine.
 > >>
 > >> Cinnamon desktop on Xorg and I do have install needrestart, which I
 > >> forgot about, so it's probably that.
 > >
 > > should the release-notes tell people to do something to needrestart to
 > > prevent this happening? or is this a bug in needsrestart?
 >
 > Needrestart _shouldn't_ do this - it maintains a blacklist of types of
 > service that shouldn't be automatically restarted, which includes
 > display managers and so on - but it does allow users to override that
 > blacklist. It would be useful to know whether Guillermo accidentally
 > ordered it to shoot him in the foot*, or whether it's weirdly buggy
 > (you'd think this kind of issue would already have been reported), or
 > whether it's a complete red herring after all and something else went
 > wrong.
 >
 > While I'm trying to imagine a way of testing it, we might as well also
 > be thinking about what we might say in the Release Notes if necessary.
 > We do after all have that systemd-run trick lying around if we need
 > an antidote to offer in section 4.1.5.
 >
 > Users running GNOME [does it matter whether it's on Wayland? Might
 > this also apply to KDE?] who have activated [needrestart,
 > bootsniper-tng, GNOME killing-spree mode...] may wish to protect
 > themselves against the possibility of an accidentally restarted user
 > session by running the upgrade from `screen` or `tmux` within a
 > `systemd-run` wrapper (e.g. `systemd-run --scope --user screen`).
 >
 > Except I never did really understand how that interacts with GNOME
 > killing-spree mode, and now I can't find all the Salsa discussions
 > from back in March.
 >
 > (* As in the old slogan "Debian GNU/Linux: giving you the power to
 > shoot yourself in each toe individually!")
 > --
 > JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
 > sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
 >
 >

Okay, I did a quick test on a VM and needrestart blacklist works properly.

By default, it restarts the services:

- accounts-daemon, avahi-daemon, colord, cups-browsed, cups, fwupd, 
packagekit, polkit, power-profiles-daemon, systemd-journald, 
systemd-manager, systemd-timesyncd, systemd-udevd, systemd-user, udisks2 
and upower.

It excludes:

- dbus, getty@tty1, lightdm, ModemManager, NetworkManager, 
systemd-logind and wpa_supplicant.

Restarting with the default list doesn't close the session and then 
retriggering needrestart manually and selecting dbus restarts the session.

Yesterday, I think I just manually selected everything and shoot myself 
in the foot because I don't always know 100% what I'm doing or remember 
everything I have installed on my laptop.