When to do nothing, logout or reboot in response to a system update.

Question

I've noticed that when I update my programming tools (packages) on Fedora using PackageKit, I will occasionally be told that I need to logout or reboot. Yet when using Yum (preferred), no such advice is present (to the best of my awareness). My rule of thumb is that if I see a tool or plugin (Eclipse) has an update, I will restart the tool. If it is a system component, like kde-base or panel, I will logout and if there is a new kernel installed that will be a reboot. Trouble is, it is just too onerous to be so aware when there are hundreds of packages involved in an update.

This also applies to apt-get on Ubuntu/Debian/etc. but not so much for Windows or Mac, I suspect.

Answer 1

The yum-security plugin should soon be processing the "needs-restart" information, and issuing a warning/message.

You can also use needs-restarting (from the yum-utils package), or "yum ps" (from the yum-plugin-ps package).