Re: Bug#1117544: xfce4 [bookworm]: Doesn't always provide a polkit agent
Control: retitle -1 xfce4 [bookworm]: Doesn't always provide a polkit agent
Control: reassign -1 xfce4 4.18
On Tue, 07 Oct 2025 at 14:19:25 +0000, Sven Grewe wrote:
When you try to install a package in another session then Gnome, you
will only get a notice that you don't have the right permission to
install.
You can reproduce this by installing Gnome first and then XFCE for example.
On Wed, 08 Oct 2025 at 12:37:22 +0000, Sven Grewe wrote:
This issue exists in Debian 12 when I have Gnome and then Xfce
installed. Running Gnome Software in the Xfce session. Installing
MATE, LXDE, LXQt after that, doesn't give me this issue any more for
some reason.
I can't reproduce this with Xfce X11 session in Debian 13 having Gnome
installed too.
This sounds like another duplicate of #843224, #862417, #900698, #1090384,
#1106490 and #1109686: the Xfce X11 session in Debian 12 didn't have a
dependency on a suitable polkit agent to use under Xfce, which meant there
was no way for gnome-software to prompt for the necessary privileges to
install packages.
When installing only Xfce, this was accidentally worked around by some
other package pulling in policykit-1-gnome as an implementation of the
polkit-1-auth-agent virtual package; but when also installing GNOME,
the dependency on polkit-1-auth-agent was satisfied by gnome-shell
(which cannot run under Xfce) so no other agent got installed.
In Debian 13, this was resolved by adding a dependency on mate-polkit to
the xfce4 metapackage.
In Debian 12, you can probably work around this by installing
policykit-1-gnome, or any other standalone polkit agent that can run
under Xfce (as selected by the OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn fields in its
.desktop file). The Xfce maintainers could resolve this in an oldstable
point release by giving xfce4 a Depends or Recommends on
policykit-1-gnome, if they want to (but now that Debian 13 has been
released, I suspect that this is not anyone's highest priority).
smcv
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