Arch Linux

timeon

Member

Registered: 2016-10-17

Posts: 14

pacman update forces application termination

Hi,

today I did a pacman -Syu and during that time I kept working in libreoffice. I was surprised that libreoffice gets terminated by force and I was unable to save the work. Is that a normal behaviour?
Until now I was used to the following:
- Applications could stay running through the pacman -Syu and might need to get restarted afterwards, with user interactions.
- In Windows, I get a dialog asking me to save my work before MS Office Updates get installed.

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,508

Website

Re: pacman update forces application termination

Hello.

Generally speaking updating doesn’t affect running applications. However:

• If an application attempts to load its component, that is now incompatible due to the update, it may experience errors.

• Some apps, in particular more complex ones, are observed to not like having their files being modified. So far I’ve seen that with Firefox, which either crashed or forced a restart in such a situation. But perhaps LibO is also affected, though I didn’t seen that myself.

It’s best to have important data saved before running an update.

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seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 69,138

Re: pacman update forces application termination

Do you have a backtrace?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Core_d … _core_dump

pacman for sure doesn't close anything
Replacing files on disk is usually not critical unless you're facing a filesystem bug or are extremely short on disk space or RAM
The one exception from the top of my head would be stuff like bleachbit which happily truncates mmap'd files if they're not blessed by the tools whiteilst…

Dynamically loading updated plugins can become a problem if eg. the plugin links a library that's also used by the main process and now you've two different versions of the library in RAM.
If it's not version tagged, you could run into a conflict here.

From what I can tell, FF tracks files on disk and tells you that it wants to restart, but that's a controlled feature, not a destructive crash.

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