Hi, sorry for reopening this thread. I don't read debian-devel@l.d.o regularily and stumbled upon this thread by accident via some blog posting (http://www.deimeke.net/dirk/blog/?/archives/3500-Restart-check-....html; German).
(Cc'ing Ritesh as requested as well the primary maintainers of the mentioned packages where I'm co-maintainer, and upstream of needrestart. See also below.) Paul Wise wrote: > On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 6:48 PM, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote: > > > Just FYI. Guido Gunther has done something similar with whatmaps > > > > https://honk.sigxcpu.org/piki/projects/whatmaps > > I count at least 6 implementations of the concept now: > > checkrestart (from debian-goodies) > needrestart > whatmaps > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/mirror/dsa-nagios.git/tree/dsa-nagios-checks/checks/dsa-check-libs > http://tracer-package.com/ > needs-restarting (from yum) There is at least one more in Debian: The "libs" check in the package hobbit-plugins: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/hobbit-plugins.git/tree/client-ext/libs (Initially seems to be forked from dsa-check-libs to be adapted for working together with the Hobbit/Xymon monitoring system, but has grown to have more features including being configurable. It also took ideas from needrestart for the hobbit-plugins libs check, too, before this had grown to be more controllable via command-line. See below.) Being co-maintainer of debian-goodies and hobbit-plugins as well as a happy user (and like pabs a sedulous bug-reporter :-) of needrestart, I'm well aware of at least these three implementations. Unfortunately merging them is not easy: * checkrestart is written in Python * needrestart is written in Perl, requires to be run as root and is focused on actually doing the restart * hobbit-plugins/client-ext/libs is written in Perl, runs as non-privileged users and outsources only a few root-permissions requiring commands via sudo. Merging tools written in Python and Perl means at least one of them needs to be completely rewritten. And hence I don't expect this to happen. But what IMHO could be merged to some extent is at least the blacklist knowledge about daemons which should not be restarted automatically. Maybe also some more common data. I imagine a separate package which just contains the well maintained blacklist of daemons not to restart automatically. AFAIK the list is neither small for needrestart nor for checkrestart. The package could be named something like daemon-restart-blacklist and provide the list e.g. in JSON or YAML format, maybe even both. (I personally would at least avoid XML. :-) Preferably this package would be maintained by upstream developers and/or maintainers from multiple of these packages together. With regards to hobbit-plugins' libs check, it's also on my TODO list to check how far I can make use of needrestart and or checkrestart to further reduce the number of implementations and code copying without needing to remove too many of its features. Since the check itself runs under an unprivileged user and only runs lsof, etc. via sudo, the actual programming language of the test doesn't matter so much. Unfortunately checkrestart doesn't yet have machine-readable yet (https://bugs.debian.org/568359), so it's less optimal for that purpose. Thankfully, needrestart's upstream (Thomas Liske, Cc'ed) already integrated a few commandline switches after a discussion with me (and possibly others) which allow to just run the tests and report the results without actually restarting anything. Citing a short explanation for the feature from a private mail by Thomas to me (now translated to English by me): | > By using the following options only the specified checks are | > performed: | > | > -k check for obsolete kernel | > | > -l check for obsolete libraries | | together with -b (Batch Mode) this results in a usable output on | /dev/stdout. This is part of needrestart since 1.1. And 1.2 (hopefully) will be part of Jessie. Examples: 167/1/0 root@c-crosser:pts/8 [~] # needrestart -b -k NEEDRESTART-VER: 1.2 NEEDRESTART-KCUR: 3.16.0-4-amd64 NEEDRESTART-KEXP: 3.16.0-4-amd64 NEEDRESTART-KSTA: 2 168/0/0 root@c-crosser:pts/8 [~] # needrestart -b -l NEEDRESTART-VER: 1.2 NEEDRESTART-SVC: dbus NEEDRESTART-SVC: wdm 169/0/0 root@c-crosser:pts/8 [~] # (JFTR: The two listed services are some of those on the mentioned blacklist. The output is from needrestart 1.2 as currently in Jessie. The one machine where I have needrestart 2.0 installed currently doesn't have any daemons to restart, so I can't test immediately if it has the same behaviour.) See also https://bugs.debian.org/762896 (by pabs). For completeness' sake: >From experience I'd say that both, libc6 and one of the library packages built by the openssl source package seem also to have a minimal implementation of that concept in their postinst scripts. But actually checking /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:amd64.postinst and /var/lib/dpkg/info/libssl1.0.0:amd64.postinst it seems that it's just a hardcoded package list, though. > Only needrestart seems to have the ability to notify user sessions > about things that need restarting. Yes. And that works quite well for me -- except that the desktop notifications look quite ugly in Awesome's notifier widget. That one neither seems to do automatic line wrapping nor does it interpret HTML tags and hence shows them as plain text. Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? 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