[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#842184: policykit-1: synaptic-pkexec no more work

[Simon McVittie]

Control: reassign 842184 policykit-1-gnome 0.105-4
Control: severity 842184 serious

On Thu, 27 Oct 2016 at 07:27:05 +0000, Grand T wrote:
> The error is in  policykit-1-gnome 0.105-4
> 
>  /etc/xdg/autostart/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop refer to 
> 
> Exec=/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
> 
> but it don't exist so it is not started !
> 
> The exec is now at/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
> 
> I modified 
> 
> /etc/xdg/autostart/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop to set up
> Exec=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1

Good catch! It looks as though this was caused by modernizing the
packaging of policykit-1-gnome from debhelper 8 to 10, which changed its
${libexecdir}, without also updating
debian/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop to use the new
value of ${libexecdir}.

So this is not actually a policykit-1 bug, but rather policykit-1-gnome,
which is a separate source package. Contrary to its name, pk-1-gnome
is not actually used in "full" GNOME any more (because GNOME Shell has
its own built-in polkit agent), but it does get used in XFCE, Unity and
GNOME Flashback.

Brian (and anyone else who is seeing #841878), are you using
policykit-1-gnome as your implementation of a polkit agent? If you
run /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1
"by hand" from a terminal, does authentication work normally for you?

(If you have edited /etc/xdg/autostart/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop
as a workaround, you will probably need to edit it again, or go back to
the version provided by the package maintainer, after this bug is fixed -
we will probably choose a different location for the authentication agent,
or go back to its old location, because the architecture-dependent path is
awkward to use in the packaging.)

Thanks,
    S