Since the upgrade of a Leap system 15.6 > 16.0 (online method) last week, today was the first weekly update for my systems. I noticed that both in a still existing 15.6 and in the 16.0 there was a Kernel and a Systemd update. The 15.6 system, updated using YaST > Software > Online Update, gave a pop-up with two warnings to boot the system asap after the update, repeating this at the end of the update. The 16.0 system, updated using Myrlyn > Updates > Package Updates, did nothing of the kind.
I looked around in Myrlyn, but could not find a configuration item for this. Am I missing something, or is Myrlyn missing the feature?
Well, basically of course the criteria YaST did use. I do not know if zypper up does similar. But somwhere YaST must have found this information, or it simply had a list of it’s own. If I remember correctly, I also got it with zen (or similar). In short: what were the criteria in YaST?
While I mostly go through the list of updates before I continue, I could miss it. And in fact, I did a boot when the suggestions where popped-up and did not when they didn’t. Not that I can not live without it. But hey, I can also live without Myrlyn when I must.
Looking through the sources of YaST, zypper and libzypp shows this is a whole new rabbit hole (well, it’s almost Easter anyway)…
It turns out there are config files /etc/zypp/needreboot and a whole directory /etc/zypp/needreboot.d/ where you could list packages that would trigger such a warning. But on my Slowroll, they are all empty. And although /usr/etc/zypp exists, there is no needreboot or needreboot.d/ there.
Apparently libzypp (or zypper?) also creates a file /run/reboot-needed. When it is created and who reads and uses it is another thing to reverse engineer.
YaST seems to have its own logic, purely based on kernel packages; it compares the installed size (!) of compressed kernels to figure out when it makes sense to warn. That strikes me as very odd and relying on weird side effects; it may or may not work reliably.
Patches appear to have a special field need_reboot that may be set by the patch creator.
I will leave it to your discretion to dig in it or not and to decide if it leads to a satisfying result. When not, then I will live without it and use Myrlyn as it is: a (very) good replacement of YaST > Software.
FWIW, I notice zypper messages like the following re kernel update… The following package requires a system reboot: kernel-default-6.19.10-1.1
and
There are running programs which still use files and libraries deleted or updated by recent upgrades. They should be restarted to benefit from the latest updates. Run 'zypper ps -s' to list these programs.
Since the last system boot core libraries or services have been updated.
Reboot is suggested to ensure that your system benefits from these updates.
Such messaging could be presented similarly via Myrlyn?
I think the first and the last message is the equivalent of what YaST reports.
The second one about “running programs” is more general. I do not think there is a YaST equivalent. The more because YaST has no equivalent for zypper ps -s, thus the YaST user is stuck there.