Comment 8 for bug 1059576

Hello Matthias, Therry and Aaron,

Mvo is right: If packagekit is installed next to aptdaemon on the same system it will be preferred when performing a packagekit action. That is a feature since aptdaemon is the default and if an user decided to install packagekit he/she seems to wants to use it.

Canonical (Mvo) provided a branch which was now merged into aptdaemon and which allows to install highly trusted packages without the need for any authentication by the desktop user. It is the decision of the distribution which packages from which repo are regarded highly trusted. This can be confgured by dropping a small configuration file. To be honest I am not a big fan of this feature neither, but it seems to be a requirement by Ubuntu.

As a side node: Some time ago PackageKit even allowed a desktop user to install any trusted software without any authentication - but this was regarded as a security issue by large parts of the Fedora community. And so it was reverted.

AFAIK the implementation of this feature in PackageKit would require some re-designing of the PackageKit internals since the daemon asks for the authentication before moving the (trans)action to the backend which is aware of the highly trusted packages. The transaction needs to be simulated before to know if any highly trusted packages are affected.

Cheers,

Sebastian