Update notifier for MATE (still not working)

[tomas at tuxteam.de]

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On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 05:57:18PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
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> On 12/29/2015 03:34 PM, tomas at tuxteam.de wrote:
> > What I expect: have the system notify the user about pending
> > updates.
> > 
> > Gnome-packagekit is installed and their components can be called
> > via the menu. What's missing (and was usual under Gnome in Wheezy)
> > is some kind of popup appearing when there are updates pending.
> > 
> > Is this still supposed to work?
> 
> You have to have some daemon running in the background which regularly
> runs "apt-get update" as otherwise the popup window never works.
> 
> Try apt-cron or something like that.

Sorry. It's me again. Next try: waited for a while, did an `apt-get update'
which actually turned up some pending updates.

No notification.

Other things I checked:

 - notifications are actually working: there is a "preview" button
   in the system management GUI for the notification thingie which
   actually turns up a notification.

 - re-did an update, this time with `pkcon get-updates' which turned
   up more pending updates (sorry for the German, but I noticed too
   late; user and host name changed to protect the innocent):

  ,------------------------------------
  | alice at bob:~$ pkcon get-updates
  |   Aktualisierungen werden abgerufen[=========================]         
  |   Zwischenspeicher wird geladen [=========================]         
  |   Abfragen                      [=========================]         
  |   Fertig                        [=========================]         
  |   Sicherheit      calendar-google-provider-38.5.0-1~deb8u1.all (stable)           Google Calendar support for lightning- and iceowl-extension
  |   Sicherheit      icedove-38.5.0-1~deb8u1.amd64 (stable)                          E-Mail- und News-Client mit RSS-Unterstützung und integriertem Spam-Filter
  |   Sicherheit      iceowl-extension-38.5.0-1~deb8u1.amd64 (stable)                 Kalender-Erweiterung für Thunderbird/Icedove
  |   [... 8 more lines ...]
  `------------------------------------

   Watching (on another terminal) with pkmon shows some activity:

  ,------------------------------------
  | alice at bob:~$ pkmon
  | Transactions:
  |  [none]
  | daemon connected=1
  | network status=wired
  | Transactions:
  |  1      /33_bbabaaaa
  | /33_bbabaaaa    allow_cancel 1
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   -1
  | /33_bbabaaaa    role         get-updates
  | /33_bbabaaaa    status       setup
  | /33_bbabaaaa    status       loading-cache
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   0
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   100
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   0
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   50
  | /33_bbabaaaa    percentage   100
  | /33_bbabaaaa    status       query
  | /33_bbabaaaa    allow_cancel 0
  | /33_bbabaaaa    status       finished
  | Transactions:
  |  [none]
  | /33_bbabaaaa    exit code: success
  `------------------------------------

  Still no cigar.

What's especially frustrating for me is that I don't know where to
look. It's like being in a forest and randomly barking up a tree
in the hope that it's the right one. Websites like PackageKit's[1]
don't help either.  Colorful, but empty. Man pages in this context:
black and white, but empty.

Is there a way to find out which component (if any) would be
responsible of packing up a DBus message and sending it to the
desktop notifier saying: "you have some updates: go ahead and
update"? Are things supposed to work like this these days? (it
used to work like this in Gnome of yore).

I'm short of hacking that up in some gross shell script.

Help?

[1] <http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/>

regards
- -- tomás
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