Restarting after Make Install....

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 19, 2010, at 5:05 PM, Diego Montalvo wrote:
> Been using FreeBSD for a long time now, but have never really been
> sure if FreeBSD needs to be restarted after installing a Port or Ports
> using "make install clean"?  What is the best practice... Used to
> restarting Windows for everything...

The simple answer is that you almost never need to restart a Unix operating system short of an update to the kernel itself, and with kernel modules even that can be avoided in many cases.  

The general answer for ports is no, you don't need to restart.  In some cases, if you update a significant proportion of the shared libraries and want to avoid having two copies taking up memory, it can be easier to reboot than to restart all of the processes which were using the updated shared libraries.  For example, if you update something huge like X11, GTK, etc it might be more convenient...

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck