Thunar, xfce4 and polkit-gnome

Question

I've spent 3 hours this morning trying to understand mount permissions in Thunar and, thus, how polkit controls user access.  I'm pleased to say it hasn't been a total waste of time because I have a much better understanding of what polkit does and why.
However, in my investigations I have seen countless forum threads by people trying to fix their Thunar mount problems.  The simple answer to almost all of these threads is "install polkit-gnome and restart".
Arch uses auth_admin_keep for internal mounting permissions - for that to work you MUST have a PolicyKit Authentication Agent installed (right?) - polkit-gnome is exactly that.  Without polkit-gnome there is no application to pop-up and ask you for your password, which is exactly what the auth_admin option wants to do.
So, how is it an optional depend for thunar?

Answer 1

.:edit:.
Whether automounting is or isn't an "optional" feature is largely irrelevant.
My main point is that policykit requires a User Authenication Agent to function correctly - gnome-session and kdelibs pull in polkit-gnome and polkit-kde respectively by default.  Why is XFCE different just because they don't ship their own User Authentication Agent?
anonymous_user wrote:It is optional because Thunar will still work without it. Mounting may not work, but file manager duties like moving and deleting files do work. At least that is my understanding of optional dependencies.
Yes, that was my understanding too... 5 years ago.
Udev and PolicyKit exist to make mounting disks, amongst other things, "as standard" across multiple environments, this functionality has been incorporated in Thunar.  Mounting in Thunar is as much a feature as moving and deleting files.
It's also worth mentioning that I didn't set out to make automounting work in Thunar - I just had these Drives appearing in my sidebar but when I clicked on them I got an error.
That's the definition of broken from a users perspective.
Last edited by dtw (2012-04-09 13:58:33)