Arch Linux

Xfce currently doesn't have its own PolicyKit authentication agent, as such it relies on others such as polkit-gnome or lxpolkit (now in lxsession) for example.

Installing polkit-gnome for example is not enough because it doesn't come with an autostart file. It used to, but upstream dropped it in 2011 stating it was easier for desktops and power users to autostart it themselves [1]. I would like to open a debate to consider adding a dependency on polkit-gnome and provide an autostart file (for example [2]), which is currently the approach of Fedora as well [3].

I think it would be beneficial to have such dependency allowing installations of Xfce to "just work" in a sense, by providing and autostarting an authentication agent. For example mounting external drives through Thunar would work out of the box.

GNOME uses another agent built in gnome-shell and Cinnamon depends and autostarts polkit-gnome. KDE and MATE also depend and autostart polkit-kde and mate-polkit respectively.

[1]: https://git.gnome.org/browse/PolicyKit-gnome/commit/?id=47ca445decf21b8de13d804b870d6ce171bad306
[2]: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/gnome/polkit-gnome.html
[3]: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/xfce4-session.git/tree/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1.desktop