Hi Adam,
thanks for asking this question!
Due to similar horrible bugs before, I have uninstalled sudo and friends, but I never
managed to uninstall pkexec due to those dependencies.
The issue and some of the comments around it prompted me to wonder -
why is `pkexec` still a thing? Particularly, why is it still a thing we
are shipping by default in just about every Fedora install?
Probably because gnome-initial-setup requires it [1]?
Does anything in Workstation use
pkexec?
On my system [2], apart from gnome-initial-setup, only Grsync references pkexec in its
source code [3].
Should we just split it out of the polkit package into a subpackage
and
stop shipping the subpackage on those editions/spins at least?
+1 on that pragmatic solution!
[1]
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/blob/master/gnome-in...
[2] I used `rpmreaper polkit` and walked through the source code of all the 14 direct
dependencies of polkit and searched them for `pkexec`. GNOME shell mentions it a lot in
source code but I cannot find it being called.
[3]
https://sourceforge.net/p/grsync/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/grsync/src/callbacks.c