Should I open a bug or would I be wasting my time

[Kevin Chadwick]

On Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:52:17 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net> wrote:

> Correct.
>

I still think blame for this problem could be aimed at polkit and KDE
rather than debian, though I take the point that Gentoo can avoid these
issues in the best way possible and appreciate the explanation.

So Debian could fix it by building kde twice, but that seems very wrong
indeed considering the size of KDE. Perhaps a subset?

Or they could build KDE without polkit, however I have read that KDE's
position is that KDE built without polkit is unsupported and would like
clarification on that if possible.

To me and please don't get offended. It basically comes down to a choice
or perhaps laziness to use polkit over the even more capable and maximum
security encouraging sudo which is compliant with Unixes traditionally
modular nature and avoids these kind of dependency problems, which no
one would argue is not a big problem and that people have been fighting
against for years with varying success that seems to have fallen away
of late.
 
> Based on gentoo's kdelibs (a core dependency for anything else kde) 
> package dependencies, there's a pre-build-configure-time option 
> (apparently --with-PolkitQt-1 to turn it on, --without... to turn it
> off) for kdelibs itself.
> 
> If that is turned on, then kdelibs both supports and symbol-links to
> the polkit-qt package, which in turn symbol-links to polkit itself.
> As with most library linking, lack of availability of that
> symbol-linked library at runtime to provide those symbols... will
> almost certainly result in a crashing (often before it even fully
> initializes) executable.
> 
> Kdelibs can be built with our without support for polkit, but if it's 
> build with it, polkit must be there in ordered to run anything using 
> those bits of kdelibs (which most kde apps will), or the executables
> will have missing symbols and will not run at all.
> 
> 

> So indeed, for those running debian/ubuntu, polkit support is a
> debian/ ubuntu decision.  But by the nature of things, they must make
> that decision for all those using their binary packages at once, at
> build- time. 

If you take PAM, support for it is widely available and has just been
added to the Linux ssh port but dependency upon it in my experience
is always optional. There are many who would not use PAM if you paid
them too and I am sure RedHat would use nothing else and I am glad PAM's
design does not cause people problems.

I therefore suggest that polkit or KDE are designed incorrectly and
would invite any thoughts or opinions on this.
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