Comment 7 for bug 297794

after further looking around, it seems there is no reliable way to get notified of system updates that are done "behind our back" without polling, which really isn't an option.

what we can eventually do is limit the pain, as we do with time zone changes, by having kded emit a dbus signal whenever the time is changed the date and time control panel.

sounds like a nice thing for 4.4 (along with putting the date and time panel in the clock config itself :)