Author: Irrwahn
Date: 2018-02-14 06:37 -600
To: dng
Subject: [DNG] IMPORTANT! How to fix degraded session management after Devuan ASCII upgrade.

PLEASE NOTE:
The following only applies to already existing ASCII systems that got
upgraded to the newest package versions as present in the repositories.
Fresh installations of Devuan ASCII 2.0.0 Beta should not be affected.

TL;DR
-----
Make sure you got the correct libpolkit-backend installed!

Background
----------
It would appear that under certain circumstances an unsuitable flavor
of libpolkit-backend-1-0-XXXX gets pulled in upon upgrade. This can lead
to a temporary loss of desktop session related functionality, namely the
ability to user-mount removable drives or to shutdown/restart the system
using the GUI controls provided by the respective desktop environment. The
issue was ultimately caused by the recent addition of elogind to the
repositories, or rather the repackaging of policykit-1 that followed suit.

Resolution
----------
1. Make sure you have at least one of (traditional) consolekit or (new)
elogind installed. (Note: You can have both installed and active; which
one is actually used however is decided by which libpolkit-backend you
choose to install, see 4.)

2. Make sure (at least one of) the above is activated. You may do so by
interactively running the 'pam-auth-update' command as root.

3. Ensure the following packages got installed:
     policykit-1              0.105-18+devuan2.4
     libpolkit-agent-1-0      0.105-18+devuan2.4

4. Install one of the mutually exclusive policykit backend libs, i.e.
   - EITHER -
     libpolkit-backend-1-0-elogind      0.105-18+devuan2.4  and
     libpolkit-gobject-1-0-elogind      0.105-18+devuan2.4

   - OR -
     libpolkit-backend-1-0-consolekit   0.105-18+devuan2.4  and
     libpolkit-gobject-1-0-consolekit   0.105-18+devuan2.4

depending on which session manager backend you intend to use, see 1.

In case you find you have a backend with -systemd in the name installed:
that one will _not_ work, and is most likely the cause why things went
sideways in the first place.

5. After making changes to the session management you should either reboot
the system or at least cycle through runlevel 1.

Note: Depending on what login manager you use in conjunction with which
desktop environment you might have to experiment a bit to find out which
of consolekit or elogind works best for you (or works[TM] at all).

Bottom line: As always in life, keep your backends covered. ;-)

HTH, HANVD, and enjoy the ASCII Beta!

Best regards
Urban

--
Sapere aude!