[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#990259: policykit-1-gnome: crashes under Wayland

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021 at 11:25:33 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 24.06.21 um 11:03 schrieb Michael Biebl:
> > Having a security sensitive application with a dead upstream is probably
> > not a good idea, so I wonder whether dropping policykit-1-gnome from the
> > archive would be a (better) alternative.

I agree, security-sensitive software needs an active upstream developer
(and if third-party projects are still relying on GNOME maintaining this,
10 years after GNOME Shell took over responsibility for being GNOME's
polkit agent, then they need to consider whether their approach is really
sustainable).

I've opened <https://bugs.debian.org/990271>.

> > I thought cinnamon had a builtin PK agent. Either this is not true or
> > the dependency is unnecessary.

I can't find a built-in PK agent.

Cinnamon was originally a fork of GNOME Shell, which has
src/shell-polkit-authentication-agent.c, but Cinnamon developers seem
to have removed the equivalent from their fork in 2013.  Unfortunately,
the commit message doesn't say why.
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/commit/4873e7f4c5b53b5cc6dc3149d1165a7c84bc3fc0

> > Simon, should we hand over policykit-1-gnome to the cinnamon maintainers?

If Cinnamon people take over its upstream development, then no objection.

If it continues to be a security-sensitive application that is dead
upstream, then having Cinnamon's Debian maintainers take over its Debian
maintenance doesn't really solve anything. Would one of the other
implementations like lxpolkit be suitable for Cinnamon, perhaps?

I've opened <https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/10172>.

    smcv