Description of problem:

Some software doesn't like being updated while it's running: canonical examples for me are Firefox and Thunderbird (for probably the same technical reason), when with reasonable frequency updating to a newer version causes any existing running process to behave badly, for some new exciting type of "badly" each time - Firefox likes opening windows with no content, Tbird just lost a mail I was composing. I've also had similar issues with OOo, and something else I forgot - I imagine any app with plug-ins, or that calls out external apps, lazily loads dlls, etc. etc., is potentially in this category.

I realise that problem isn't a PackageKit bug per se. However, it would be nice to have some way in the UI to mitigate this issue - although I think it's clear that PK cannot solve this alone.

What I would like, as a user, is some kind of warning that some of my apps might go haywire if I'm running the update while they're open. What would be absolutely superb would be some way of having PK shut the app down, update it, and re-open it in previous state - though almost certainly quite difficult to accomplish.

Although more pop-up warnings aren't exactly wonderful, I would much prefer a dialog saying something like "I'm about to update Tbird. Because you have it open already, you need to shut it down before I start, otherwise you risk losing data".

Presumably this would need some kind of input from the packaging community about exactly what kind of data a package could provide to communicate this - a good start would just be a simple flag which says "I'm troublesome" and then PackageKit giving me a list of troublesome apps before updating (if there are any). Everything else would be extra gravy tbh.