[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1076728: elogind: privileged operation with polkit fails

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 at 14:53:11 +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> I'm a bit unsure how to reply to your mail because I don't really see
> questions.

My question was: does XFCE provide a polkit authentication agent?

And it seems that the answer is in three parts:

1. there is no polkit authentication agent that is part of the XFCE
   project and is packaged in Debian;

2. installing XFCE doesn't really guarantee to provide someone else's
   polkit authentication agent, either;

3. but on a typical end-user system the unmaintained policykit-1-gnome
   might get pulled in by indirect dependencies if you're lucky, and if
   it does, it will get started by the XDG autostart mechanism
   (/etc/xdg/autostart), because XFCE is included in its OnlyShowIn

(One dependency chain that *might* pull in policykit-1-gnome, depending
on how many Recommends have been removed and what order things were
installed in, is
task-xfce-desktop -R-> network-manager-gnome -D-> nm-connection-editor -D-> policykit-1-gnome
where "-R->" represents a Recommends and "-D->" a Depends. There might
be others.)

    smcv