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Stupid installers. by Phoon2007-07-01 01:40:39
  Or that they don't want to restart at all? by Michiel2007-07-01 02:00:07
    A simple, "It won't work until you restart", by Phoon2007-07-01 02:02:28
      I love it when they say that... by shadowsystems2007-07-01 02:25:11
        tsk tsk tsk by pitje2007-07-01 03:16:17
          *LART* by shadowsystems2007-07-01 03:44:58
            ... Sigh. by bwkaz2007-07-01 05:27:08
              a simple halt process apply fix then restart by joecrouse2007-07-01 09:42:32
                Yes, true, it woudn't be hard. But: by bwkaz2007-07-01 09:47:36
                  If the process halts does the replace by joecrouse2007-07-01 10:12:46
                    The system doesn't have to restart. by bwkaz2007-07-01 10:25:01
                      Exactly what I was meaning. by joecrouse2007-07-01 10:39:21
                        Hmm, maybe. by bwkaz 2007-07-01 13:24:07
It would certainly require cooperation from the program that has the file open, though: you'd have to be able to tell it when it needs to reopen all its files to get the new versions, or it'll run with some old and some new files until it got restarted.

(Unix programs have this same problem, actually. But it's almost never a real problem, because what happens is almost always well-defined. If libraries are replaced, they were opened by the lib's soname, and by convention, sonames are changed if-and-only-if the new library is binary-incompatible with the old. And they aren't replaced if the new version isn't compatible; the new version is just laid down instead. Other files rarely have compatibility issues, either forward or backward. On windows, DLLs are almost always binary-incompatible, and they're almost always replaced, because the version isn't part of their name.)

Otherwise you'd have to just punt and tell the user "now you have to restart any programs that might have had this file open". And windows makes it hard or impossible to tell which programs have a specific file open -- unless you have a kernel driver handy, like process explorer's. (Unix's /proc/<PID>/fd/ directory makes it a lot easier, but as above, the discipline on the part of library writers makes it a lot less of a problem on Unix. Plus the fact that you *can* delete an in-use file.)
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