ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 10:29:13AM -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-09-04 at 16:53 +0200, Daniel Holbach wrote:
> > in a brief catch-up call Alejandro asked how we're going to uninstall
> > apps. Colin explained that there's still the open question about how we
> > can find out if the app (which is going to be uninstalled) is currently
> > running or not and what to do about it.
> > 
> > This might be a question for Ted (or anyone else working on the
> > application lifecycle: how can we bring click and the app lifecycle
> > together in this scenario?
> 
> Detecting isn't that difficult.  The part that I don't think we have is
> how do we "pause" the garbage collector for a limited set of time.  I
> think that I can get the other parts to work nicely if we have some sort
> of way to mark a version as held.

This goes back to the question of whether we 1) have click call out to
something else to ask whether an app is running before removing it, or
2) have something else notify click when apps start and stop in order
that it can avoid removing them when they're running.  1) means that we
will often need to run garbage collection later, but 2) means that
starting and stopping apps now has the overhead of talking to click and
furthermore sounds rather hard to do reliably.

So I think 1) is the best option, which means that I need to know what
specifically I need to do to ask whether a given app ID is currently
running, and then I can include that when I write the removal code and
the garbage collector.

In other words, I cannot answer your question about pausing the garbage
collector until you answer mine about exactly how to find this
information :-), and the answer will probably be that the forthcoming
garbage collector will ask or if necessary have a hook system.

(Ideally, I'd like to know the best way to do this in both Unity 7 and
8.)

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]