Remote upgrade possible?

[Mike Jeays]

On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 23:26, Tabor Kelly wrote:
> Laurence Sanford wrote:
> > Joseph Koenig (jWeb) wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > This is possible, however you are always taking a chance when you 
> > installworld without going to single user mode first. That said, I make 
> > a habit out of pushing my luck with systems I have in front of me by 
> > going so far as to make installworld while using an xterm in X-windows. 
> 
> I routinely use 'portupgrade -rRN' in xterm, in X-Windows to install new 
> ports on my box. The second to last time I did this, one of the ports 
> what was upgraded was xterm. And it worked! Can anybody explain to my 
> why nothing bad happened? Am I running a risk when I do this?

This seems pretty safe to me. When xterm gets invoked, the whole of the
code gets loaded into memory for execution, and there is no reason why
it would look at the disk copy again.  If you upgrade the xterm binary,
nothing will happen to xterms that are already running.  If you create
new ones, you will get the new version.  I am more surprised that there
are still any udpdates being made to xterm - it must have been
essentially stable for years now.