[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1135572: polkitd: please rename /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/polkit-tmpfiles.conf to /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/polkitd.conf

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 02 May 2026 at 22:37:44 +0200, Alexandre Detiste wrote:
>Having a "<something->tmpfiles.conf" filename inside /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/
>feels nonsensical (maybe that's less work with dh_install).

This is actually from upstream, not Debian-specific. Upstream has 
sysusers.d(5) and tmpfiles.d(5) snippets both coming from data/ in the 
source code, so they can't both be named polkit.conf (or polkitd.conf) 
without moving at least one of them to a subdirectory, which would make 
the build system more verbose.

polkit is the name of the upstream project (in Debian it's still 
src:policykit-1, the old name, for historical reasons) so polkit.conf or 
polkit-*.conf makes sense as a name. In Debian we split the source 
package into multiple binary packages, so polkitd becomes its own 
package, but in some other distros like Arch the whole polkit codebase 
turns into one "polkit" package.

Upstream is unlikely to rename things to make more sense in Debian if it 
comes at the expense of making the naming make less sense in some other 
distro.

>Could this be renamed to /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/polkitd.conf ?
>
>I currently needed a special casing in my tool cruft-ng
>to handel this weirdness.

There is no API guarantee that tmpfiles.d(5) snippets' names are a 
perfect match for Debian package names: polkit[-tmpfiles].conf could 
equally well have been in a polkit-common package or something like 
that. The only real requirement is that the names have enough 
namespacing to avoid collisions between unrelated packages.

Could cruft-ng perhaps look at the package that owns the file 
(dpkg -S equivalent) rather than its filename?

     smcv