[systemd-devel] Avoid polkit queries from systemctl in package maintainer scripts/when running as root?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 04.04.16 17:31, Martin Pitt (martin.pitt at ubuntu.com) wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> a recent (mostly cosmetical) bug report [1] made me aware that we
> currently query polkit for a lot of systemctl
> enable/daemon-reload/etc. calls from package maintainer scripts. At
> least in Debian, installing a package with a .service usually does
> something like "systemctl enable/start foo", and installing a package
> with a SysV script runs "systemctl daemon-reload" to pick up the new
> init script.
> 
> In all those cases systemctl is guaranteed to run as root, and any
> potential interactive PK prompt would be totally unexpected -- because
> of root, and because package installation is supposed to be
> non-interactive and not hang. So this introduces a potentially
> unreliable moving part and also assumes that polkit actually works all
> the time (cf. package upgrades).

We already bypass PK if the client is privileged. See
bus_verify_polkit_async() in src/shared/bus-util.c, the calls for
sd_bus_query_sender_privilege(). Are you saying that bypass doesn't
work for you?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat