Comment 2 for bug 153911

That's a great solution.
During a dist-upgrade, instead of having it show how many updated packages are available, changing to a progress icon and showing "Distribution upgrade in progress..." on mouse-hover.
During a regular upgrade, change to the progress icon and say "Installing system updates..." on mouse-hover.

This could probably be done with signaling, right?
A (probably) uglier solution would be a status file, indicating to adept_notifier which state it should show: no updates, x updates available, upgrade, dist-upgrade.