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

Brandon Werner brandon_code at fastmail.fm
Fri Sep 26 02:46:55 BST 2025


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.
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