Upgrading ports while processes are running.

[Danny Carroll]

 Hiya All,

I just finished upgrading perl on one of my machines and something
crossed my mind while it was busy compiling and reinstalling all of the
ports that depended on perl.
Will a port install fail if it cannot write to a file because it's in-use?
Also, is it necessary to restart the server or at lease the apps after a
port upgrade?

The answer to the second question is certainly yes.   But is it
considered dangerous to upgrade a port that is currently running?
Things like mysql and apache come to mind.

To take it one step further, what about shared libraries?   If a process
is using a shared lib, then it seems that it does not lock the file for
writing, but I would think that it would not start using the lib until
you restarted all of the processes that used that shared lib.
Once the last process using the shared lib is killed, is it
automatically unlinked from memory?

I guess best practice should be to restart the system after a major port
upgrade (unless you know which processes depend on the files that have
been upgraded - then you should just be able to restart those processes).

-D