Hi folks, thanks for the replies!
The best option is to just send a signal over DBus (system bus) that some updates were installed (ideally with some details). That can be picked up by any daemon in the user session and get translated to a persistent notification with a reboot button.
That's what I'm trying now, but using a socket instead of dbus because using a system-dbus to notify users won't work, and using user's dbus-session from a root daemon also doesn't work. I didn't think about an user-daemon trying to read from system-dbus, I'll check if I manage, we could remove the socket file communication and stick to dbus @being notified of failed updates Completely agree that's something needed! Right now the update process work with t-u launches /usr/bin/rebootmgrctl reboot if it manages to update successfully Right now we do not have any hook on update failure in t-u, so we will need to add to that. Adding an update-failed to the user-facing daemon is trivial At this point I'm thinking about moving this "talk with user-facing daemon" thing away from rebootmgr and bake it into transactional-update, something on the lines of transactional-update cleanup dup **notify** And set up a notification path (instead of a reboot one) in t-u itself Will have to investigate how involved this is, the aim of this was just to provide a working solution while packagekit integration (and so discover and gnome-software) integration is finished. So the idea was not to move too much stuff around and do not interfere too much also with non-desktop (microos/kubic) setups Regards, Luca