Le 01/07/2016 16:59, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult a écrit :
> what I never really actually understood: what do we really need it
> for ? what's the real-world problem behind to be solved ?

     The real problem behind was to replace sudo by something more 
complicated, for the sake of complication. sudo allows simple things to 
be done with simple config and complicated things with complicated 
config. Policykit is better: all is complicated, the config and the 
machinery to handle it, which is a tangle of daemons, sockets and, of 
course, dbus and possibly systemd, obviously for the sake of entangling 
it as much as possible. Plus it replaces a single and simple command by 
a whole library.

     Replacing a simple system with a complicated one, may be an amusing 
game, but should remain a game.

     I expected most of the requests would be done by applications by 
just invoking pkexec, which is a kind of replacement for sudo, but it is 
only true for some launchers, like the one of Synaptic (I have written 
my own replcement for pkexec and it works). But Policykit comes with 
several commands and I'm afraid Xfce4 applets, for example, make calls 
to the polkit library rather than invoke these commands.

     Therefore, IMHO, we are left with two options: either elaborate a 
polkit-shim or discard applications which use it.

     Didier