On Sat, 23 May 2020 at 21:55:26 -0500, Stephen Paul Weber wrote: > After installing `gnome-software` when I try > to install anything it does not prompt for password and simply says "you do > not > have permission to install software". > > I am not running under a full GNOME environment, but nevertheless policykit > and > packagekit and dbus are running, if that is relevant.
You also need to be running a polkit "agent", which is the UI component that prompts for a password. In Debian this is represented by the polkit-1-auth-agent virtual package. In the full GNOME desktop (which is what GNOME Software is primarily designed for), the agent is part of GNOME Shell itself. Other full desktop environments should either have a built-in polkit agent, or depend on one that is a separate process and start it during session startup. If you are building your own desktop environment from individual packages, and you want to be able to authenticate for privileged actions, then you'll need to include a polkit agent. Other desktops' polkit agents include include polkit-kde-agent-1, lxpolkit, lxqt-policykit, mate-polkit, ukui-polkit and policykit-1-gnome. policykit-1-gnome is the GNOME 2 implementation, which is no longer used in GNOME itself, and I suspect it's essentially unmaintained; but it's still used in Cinnamon, XFCE and I think also Unity. It is not straightforward to make packages like gnome-software recommend on a polkit agent, because the right implementation to prefer depends on the desktop environment you are using: I suspect you would not want it to have a Recommends on "gnome-shell | polkit-1-auth-agent", but pulling in a less-maintained implementation like policykit-1-gnome would not be appropriate for GNOME users. smcv