RHEL 10 recently removed tracer, so I am looking for how to replace its functionality in Cockpit. We used tracer to determine what needs to happen after applying OS updates.

The current output is very oriented to human text formatting, and is hard to parse mechanically, from e.g. Ansible or Cockpit. In Cockpit we used tracer's python API, but that's not available for dnf needs-restarting.

The hardest is kernel updates: After that, dnf needs-restarting is empty, but --reboothint has

Core libraries or services have been updated since boot-up:
  * dbus
  * kernel
  * kernel-core

Reboot is required to fully utilize these updates.
More information: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/27943

Parsing that mechanically is very error-prone. Can you please add a --json or similarly structured output? E.g.

{"type": "reboot", "packages": ["dbus", "kernel", "kernel-core"], "documentation": "https://access.redhat.com/solutions/27943"}

(or split it up by package to be more consistent with the other formats below – that's not very important)

This also applies to other updates. For example, the process list looks like this:

2489 : /usr/bin/podman --log-level=info system service

This is fairly easy to machine read still, but having this output more structured as JSON would be helpful:

[{"type": "process", "pid": 2489, "cmdline": ["/usr/bin/podman", "--log-level=info", "system", "service"]}, {...}, ...]

Likewise, --services could look like

[{"type": "unit", "unit": "podman.service"}, {...}, ...]

Thanks!