Question: Is tracer considering if systemd services were restarted since the package update or does it just rely on system uptime?

[FelixSchwarz]

The README says:

Detecting whether file is outdated or not is based on a simple idea. If application has loaded in memory any version of a file which is provided by any package updated since system was booted up, tracer consider this application as outdated.

However I can not square this with issues like #208: The way I read the readme means that tracer would not check the time a service was restarted and it would always report a service as "needs restart" until the system is rebooted?

Maybe I am just misunderstanding the docs?

[FrostyX]

Is tracer considering if systemd services were restarted since the package update or does it just rely on system uptime?

Hello @FelixSchwarz,
Tracer finds all the packages that you have updated since you started your computer. Then it finds all running processes that use files provided by those packages. And reports processes that started before the update.

So the system uptime is used only to know since when we should query the package updates (so that we don't query the entire history from when the system was installed).

The way I read the readme means that tracer would not check the time a service was restarted and it would always report a service as "needs restart" until the system is rebooted?

Doing systemctl restart foo.service should definitely make the service disappear from Tracer output. If not, then it is a bug.

However I can not square this with issues like #208

Yeah, I cannot square them either :-)
We had similar reports in the past and it always was some corner-case issue that could be fixed. But the debugging part is hard because usually, they can't be reproduced easily.