Thanks for the suggestion. It looks like the Update Control framework should work well for most update flows. If the user initiates reboot or shutdown, a hook can use the DBus API to tell Mender client to continue to ArtifactReboot. The only case I can think of where the use of a pause prior to ArtifactReboot will not work is if the user abruptly cuts power to the device – in that scenario, Mender client will rollback the update.
A related question – do you know when Mender client 3.3 will be released? I’d like to build pauses into deployments via Mender server, but I’m seeing failures related to issue MEN-5421 in versions 3.0 and 3.1, and unrelated failures in version 3.2, which may be related to problems described in this Mender Hub thread: