Bug 535431

*** Bug 535948 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

kupdateapplet uses PolicyKit to figure out whether the user is permitted to install updates. kupdateapplet's code has not changed for months. I guess the problem is somewhere in the PolicyKit mechanism. Is PolicyKit-kde installed?

Yes.And it's running.

It seems to be a generic packagekit/policykit bug. See: #538087

Another error message I (now?) get on Factory: "DBus error : org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod : Method "UpdatePackages" with signature "as" on interface "org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction" doesn't exist "

Scott, has the PackageKit api changed?

*** Bug 538087 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(In reply to comment #6)
> Scott, has the PackageKit api changed?

PackageKit has changed to use the new polkit instead of PolicyKit for
authentication. Is polkitd running.

Not sure if this is the same issue but we had a similar issue in the past with
nothing providing an authentication agent on KDE. Is there a counterpart to polkit-gnome available (similar to the old PolicyKit-gnome / PolicyKit-kde) ?

Note: I see upstream commits in lib/packagekit-qt (on 8/13 and 8/14) dealing with this change...

This is wonderful :((( . One thing we need to talk about at the openSUSE conference is how to not push in random unstable stuff without telling others.

Scott, when was PackageKit changed? The PackageKit.changes only talks about PolicyKit and not about polkit.

i think it was policykit that was changed.

I don't want new version of PackageKit, so we need to fix this.

@#12 - Policykit only saw the fix for bnc#509108 since 11.1 release, so I have my doubts.

I can see 'Port to polkit1' in 'rpm -q --changelog PackageKit' on 11.2. And the newer version of PolicyKit is indeed called polkit (gee).

Since 11.2 ships both PolicyKit and polkit, would it be possible to go back to the PackageKit version that uses the released version (i.e. PolicyKit) and keep the polkit version only somewhere for GNOME? That would keep both KUpdateApplet and PolicyKit-kde working (assuming there are not any important changes that would warrant porting of both to the newer version).

Do you think using an older version of PolicyKit and Packagekit might fix these incompatibilities?

PolicyKit 0.5.x is only compatible with polkit1. Is there a chance we switch to polkit1?

Well, we use 0.94 which seems to be the polkit1 API anyways.

Comment #4 is because the applet was not synced with PackageKit 0.5.x API. I have fixed this in my local git. After doing that I was able to install patches successfully.

I have submitted home:dmacvicar:branches:KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop/kupdateapplet to KDE4:Factory:Desktop

this makes it compatible with PackageKit 0.5.x, merges the kde4- renaming that never got back into the git repository and removes policykit dependencies. This should be handled 100% by PackageKit now.

I was sucessfull at updating my system. I have sudo enabled for my local user, so I guess we still need a KDE4 agent for polkit.

Testing appreciated, may be the bug is fixed, as the PolicyKit problem Stefan describes then switched to the API incompatible error and the 2 problems are mixed in the bug report.

*** Bug 540155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Tested, update works if polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 is running. Let's close this one and keep bug 538897 open to track the authentication issue.

Let see if it can be close now. :-)

No, this cannot be closed yet :(. Right now it looks like the only feasible resolution for bug #538897 is WONTFIX.

Thomas, can you please comment on the possibility of dumping the kupdateapplet packagekit backend for 11.2 and going with the zypp backend? To me it looks that should be the preferred choice anyway and it would solve this mess in a very trivial way, but the backend seems to have issues here (sometimes correctly reports updates available, but then complains about having nothing to do when told to proceed).

(In reply to comment #26)
> Thomas, can you please comment on the possibility of dumping the kupdateapplet
> packagekit backend for 11.2 and going with the zypp backend? To me it looks
> that should be the preferred choice anyway and it would solve this mess in a
> very trivial way, but the backend seems to have issues here (sometimes
> correctly reports updates available, but then complains about having nothing to
> do when told to proceed).

kupdateapplet's zypp backend has neither been maintained nor tested for a long time. That's the reason why we shouldn't use the zypp backend as default.

Comment #24 tells that the packagekit backend works aside from packagekit authentication. I think authentication should be fixed instead of using a  workaround.

Any objections?

Authentication cannot be fixed, because it does not exist. You can see bug #538897 for all the gory details (and some missing, like the fact that policykit docs are pathetically useless in practice). To put it in a perspective - for M8 the zypp backend is bound to work better in KDE, regardless of its state. I have doubts about feasibility of #538897 even for RC1.

I don't understand why our native solution is unmaintained in favour of something that just brings us trouble, but then the only solution for 11.2 is going with the GNOME polkit authentication agent, so closing this one again.