When doing an offline-update error reporting needs special handling. https://github.com/hughsie/PackageKit/blob/376983f0c3e03dec56f57adf1b06296625cca685/lib/packagekit-glib2/pk-offline.c#L503 Supposedly some sort of notification "things have gone terribly wrong" which opens discover with more information, as obtained from the status file, so the user can cry at their distro or try to workaround the problem. Probably wouldn't hurt to see what gnome does visually.