Control: reopen -1
Back in 2024, I wrote:
As discussed on #1076728, there is a de facto expectation that each "good"
desktop environment will provide a polkit authentication agent that is
suitable for it, similar to the expectation for o.fd.Notifications.
I've reported this as a bug in the xfce4 metapackage, but it might
make sense to push it down into a "smaller", lower-level package like
xfce4-session (I am not familiar with the details of XFCE's design).
This bug was closed by the upload of xfce-polkit, but I'm reopening it,
for two reasons:
1. "a polkit agent for XFCE exists in the archive" is not the same
thing as "normal installations of the XFCE desktop include a
polkit agent by default";
2. xfce-polkit is available in unstable but will not be included in
trixie, because it was only uploaded after the hard freeze had begun
Please choose a suitable polkit agent and add it as a dependency, or at
least as a Recommends.
The release team indicated in #1108167 that it's too late for
xfce-polkit to be added to trixie (it's in unstable but will not
migrate). So I think the best solution to this for trixie would be for
the xfce4 metapackage (or maybe xfce4-sesion?) to gain a Depends or
Recommends on something like
xfce-polkit | mate-polkit
which would result in new trixie installations with XFCE getting
mate-polkit, and new forky installations with XFCE getting xfce-polkit
instead.
Or you could choose a different polkit agent instead of mate-polkit if
there is a better one - but whichever one is chosen, it must have suitable
values for OnlyShowIn and NotShowIn to make it run under XFCE.
mate-polkit seems to be OK for this purpose, because it only has
NotShowIn=GNOME;KDE; and no OnlyShowIn, so it will be run under XFCE. It
would probably be a good idea to talk to the MATE maintainers and make
sure they are aware that XFCE in trixie will also be relying on their
polkit agent.
Many of the other polkit agents are specifically *not* suitable for this
purpose: for example, lxpolkit has NotShowIn=...;XFCE;...; so it will
not get run in an XFCE desktop environment, even if it happens to be
installed.
I am not an XFCE user myself, so I am not in a position to provide
a tested patch or detailed support here, sorry.
Thanks,
smcv
