@brown121407@fosstodon.org You could do as I do. Get pissed off at pieces not working the way you want, rip them out, and replace them with improvised shell scripts.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2017/08/24/homebrew-update-notifier-update/

(TL;DR: When I upgraded to *buntu 14.04, I got pissed off that the update notifier no longer had an option to turn off the "reboot to update your kernel" nags, so I ripped it out and replaced it with something homemade. In 2017, I rewrote it in Python for nicer UX.)