[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1115933: Error on login: XFCE PolicyKit Agent ... authentication agent already exists

[Peter B]

On 26/09/2025 02:46, Brandon Werner wrote:
> CCing the polkit folks for their input. This bug is in regards to two polkit agents being installed in testing/unstable now that xfce-polkit has migrated to testing. They cause an error message to appear when both try to start after logging into the desktop.
> I think that xfce-polkit is pulled in due to the virtual package polkit-1-auth-agent. I found two packages that depend on this virtual package and one that recommends it with a fresh xfce install but there may be more. nm-connection-editor and network-manager-applet depend on this virtual package,. Thunar recommends it. Xfce4 recommends mate-polkit directly.
> Is it possible that the virtual polkit-1-auth-agent dependency of the network-manager packages is resolved first and xfce-polkit happens to be picked, and then mate-polkit is also installed to satisfy the recommends for xfce4? This is all guessing; I don't know how dependency resolution works in apt in these sorts of situations.
> Both these packages seem to do about the same thing, so I think choosing one and making sure only one is installed would be fine. This seems best decided by the xfce maintainers.

Hi,

I'm wondering if the best solution would be for xfce4 to recommend
the virtual package polkit-1-auth-agent instead of specifically mate-polkit?
That would fix this bug.

Also, mate-polkit, as well as depending on accountsservice,
also depends on polkitd which pulls in systemd.
That would not go well for users of XFCE on Devuan etc.

Regards,
Peter