Day: GNOME OS

There are two issues here:
1. Some package managers don't atomically put their new sets of files into place. This could cause problems in the event of an unexpected power cut.
2. Current package managers update application files while those applications are still open.

#1 can (probably) be solved just by batching everything up that rpm or deb does into a single btrfs transaction.

#2 is a little more subtle. Most update systems that I'm aware of don't even try to solve this problem. For example, Android forces you to restart your apps after you've upgraded them. (Application restarts are less of a big deal in Android, though, because of how they designed process lifecycle.)

In general, it seems sufficient to restart most applications. Maybe a flag could be introduced indicating whether the application needs to be auto-restarted, or whether it chooses to handle updates at the application level (by using inotfy, or by keeping a bunch of fds open like Chrome does).

Please don't bother re-inventing the chroot wheel for GNOME. I know how to set up chroots and virtual machines, thanks very much.