byobu: number of updates available doesn’t get cleared

Environment: RHEL 7.6 (Maipo), byobu v5.73, Screen v4.01.00devel (2006-05-02)

Even after a complete update of the system (via yum in this case) the number of updates available indicator on the status line on byobu doesn’t get updated. This happens regardless of terminal multiplexer you’re using (either screen, or tmux.) This indicator seems to be cached under /dev/shm/byobu-mhan-CQCSeDjp/cache.screen folder, and a very short-lived, temporary workaround seems to be simply emptying out the folder. More permanent solution would be to fix the script itself (/usr/libexec/byobu/updates_available). On line 66, the following yum command is executed:

yum list updates -q | grep -vc "Updated Packages"

That is supposed to return the number of updates available, but it only works properly when it’s under under sudo on this system. It fails with an error message when it is run with user account, which byobu assumes when this script is run:

Cannot upload enabled repos report, is this client registered?

This seems to be a message related to RH subscription manager, which is typically installed as a plugin to yum. We can run without plugins to see if it still complains:

No complaint here. And return of 0 is promising. That 1! below has been an eyesore, so for now, this will be a good enough of a fix for me. This may disable some repos that were added as plugins, and I will have to double check that some other time. Adding –noplugins to line 66 in /usr/libexec/byobu/updates_available.