PolicyKit and new HAL?

[Christian Weeks <christian.weeks@oracle.com>]

Hi
I've just noticed that recent HAL changes have broken the click to mount
of nautilus.

When I click any hard disk type device, I now get a fun and useful popup
and the disk doesn't mount:

"Cannot mount volume."
"Error org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.PermissionDeniedByPolicy."
Details: "hal-storage-fixed-mount refused uid 1000" (1000 is me)

>From the hal (0.5.9-1) changelog:
    - debian/patches/55_nonpolkit-mount-policy.patch
(containing this):
+        /* root can do everything; only allow handling removable
devices
+         * without uid change to non-root users */
+        if (!invoked_by_uid || strcmp(invoked_by_uid, "0"))
+                if (!privilege || strcmp (privilege,
"hal-storage-removable-mount"))
+                        permission_denied_privilege (privilege,
invoked_by_uid);

So, in summary, it appears a whole new privileges system has arrived.
Except that I cannot control it. A bit of research indicates that the
"PolicyKit" is supposed to manage these privileges. Is there any
information on when policykit is going to be debianised? I looked at the
pkg-utopia svn repository and there is nothing there that appears to be
ready- or even recent (several months have passed since the last code
commit).

If PolicyKit is going to be some time in development, could we at least
fall back to where we were before this patch: i.e. anyone can mount
anything? Or do I have to install etch's hal (and all that pain) to
bring back what I want?

PS. Command line solutions are all well and good, but what the point of
the UI then?

Thanks
Christian