FS#36859 - [lxpolkit] missing optional 'required by'

Attached to Project: Community Packages
Opened by Kevin (pancakes) - Tuesday, 10 September 2013, 17:54 GMT
Last edited by Balló György (City-busz) - Saturday, 11 January 2014, 20:57 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages
Status Closed
Assigned To Balló György (City-busz)
Architecture All
Severity Very Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Background: Since a recent version of polkit-gnome stopped being autostarted by default, I noticed that I should have been using lxpolkit anyway (on xfce).
reference: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/polkit-gnome&id=68cc1a006a3af6fd6e11421ce6e2072a1d98cacf

Description:
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/polkit-gnome/ lists a bunch of optional 'required by', whereas lxpolkit doesn't.
This makes it less straightforward for people looking at pacman -Qi input for these packages to notice that they can use lxpolkit (or vice versa).
I'm not sure if one can add required-by in this package instead of adding an optional dependency for each of the relevant packages instead, in which case would I have to make a bug report for each of the relevant packages?

I only tested thunar and gparted, both of which worked with lxpolkit with no additional config.

Additional info:
Let me know if I'm supposed to do the bug report for thunar/gparted/etc instead.

It would be great if someone can clarify or refer me to docs explaining how the relation between "required-by" and "dependencies" gets synchronized accross the packages.

Also, maybe it's better to have a dummy package that they both (lxpolkit and gnome-polkit, and maybe others) provide and the relevant packages would optionally depend on that instead.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Balló György (City-busz)
Saturday, 11 January 2014, 20:57 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  Follow up:  FS#38468 ,  FS#38466 ,  FS#38465 
Comment by Balló György (City-busz) - Tuesday, 10 September 2013, 18:57 GMT
The main problem is that it's impossible to ensure if a polkit authentication agent is autostarted in the actual user X session. E.g. if you install gnome-shell, then it provides a polkit authentication agent, but only if you logged in into GNOME. So even if we would add provides=('polkit-authentication-agent') to gnome-shell, cinnamon, lxpolkit, polkit-gnome and polkit-kde, and you see these choices, when you try to install polkit-authentication-agent, installing one of them is not enough if you log in into another X session, and not ensure to autostart the agent.

Of course, the current situation is not perfect, so we should remove 'polkit-gnome' optional dependency from packages, and maybe replace it with 'polkit-authentication-agent', and add provides=('polkit-authentication-agent') to all polkit-agents.
Comment by Pablo Lezaeta (Jristz) - Friday, 13 September 2013, 18:47 GMT
Another less cool option is add lxpolkit to optdeps alongside polkit-gnome and mention that this is the preffered one if on run utside GNOME or GNOME flashback.

A three option is remove that polkit-gnome or lxpolkit and add a optdep to polkit that recommend any of those two for a graphical polkit login.

In any case a TODO need to by done, right??
Comment by Balló György (City-busz) - Saturday, 11 January 2014, 20:30 GMT
I opened the following tasks that probably clarify this situation:
 FS#38468  - [polkit] Add a post-install note about GUI agents
 FS#38466  - [gparted] Replace polkit-gnome with polkit in optdepends
 FS#38465  - [thunar] Remove polkit-gnome from optdepends

If you have any more ideas, then post it there.

I'll remove polkit-gnome optional dependency from all remaining packages. Adding lxpolkit to optdeps alongside polkit-gnome goes nowhere, since we also have mate-polkit and polkit-kde and so on. Polkit users should read this section of the wiki page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Polkit#Authentication_agents

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