Is there a way to determine when DNF offline-upgrade is needed?

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As the title says, I came across the post announcing how to use DNF for offline upgrades after looking at the Jan 17th post about them.

Using those commands a few times, it is nice to be able to trigger the offline updates from DNF now.

I was wondering if anyone might have an idea how to determine in DNF when a package requires offline-upgrade vs a basic upgrade . Akin to how Gnome Software or KDE Discover seem, able to do this. Is there a flag about the packages that DNF could output in a bash script? Or some other way to look at that?

Thank you!

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I don’t know if it helps:
man dnf needs-restarting

It depends a bit on your specification of your computer. In my case I do not use the offline upgrade. I do decide depending of the updates if i will reboot or not.

If I see that there is an update for pipewire, wireplumber or alsa, i do wait till after a meeting when I have to use zoom for example.

I do go thru the list of updates before press yes to continue, so i always can avoid problems or surprises. If i do see that there is a kernel update i do it before switch off the computer and restart it again to see if everything still works as it should.

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I’m not aware of a way to ascertain this before the update. dnf needs-restarting will tell you after you’ve run an upgrade, and so will the dnf tracer plugin:

https://dnf-plugins-extras.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tracer.html

Do Gnome software/Discover really only suggest reboots sometimes? I thought they always only update on reboots, unless the updates are for Flatpaks which do not need rebooting.

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You could do it manually by making a list of packages that normally require a reboot and check that vs the output of dnf check-updates and do offline-update based on that.

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