[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#894273: policykit-1-gnome: polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 fails to start when hidepid=2

[Chiraag Nataraj]

Package: policykit-1-gnome
Version: 0.105-6
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I happen to run my system with /proc mounted with hidepid=2 for security reasons. I tried starting polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 as well as mate-polkit and they both failed (I use awesome window manager, so I need to start the auth agent manually). Further investigation/sleuthing led me to discover that hidepid=2 breaks PolicyKit (it supposedly also breaks systemd-logind, but I haven't had any trouble with that yet...maybe that's been fixed?). This seems to be completely undocumented, as I ended up discovering this on a random forum. Am I missing something or is this completely undocumented? And if it is undocumented, can we put a note in the package description or in the README? Alternatively, is there a workaround for this and can we document that somewhere?

Sincerely,

Chiraag

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.15.11-chiraag (SMP w/8 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages policykit-1-gnome depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.27-2
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0     2.36.11-2
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.56.0-4
ii  libgtk-3-0             3.22.29-2
ii  libpolkit-agent-1-0    0.113-6
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.113-6
ii  policykit-1            0.113-6

policykit-1-gnome recommends no packages.

policykit-1-gnome suggests no packages.