An action file is always needed with polkit to describe the privileged
actions that are available to the subject (client program). For GParted
the only available action is to run the gparted shell script as root.
Note that the polkit action file will be installed into location
$(prefix)/share/polkit-1/actions. This is required by the GNU Coding
Standards [1] and to prevent 'make distcheck' from failing [2]. However
polkit only uses /usr/share/polkit-1/actions for it's action files [3].
This dilemma was discussed in this Bugzilla bug 776437 and on the
general Automake discussion email list [4]. The solution is to simply
document in the README file that a manual additional installation step
may be required.
The action file is marked as translatable with the underscore (_) of the
_description and _message tags identifying the string to be translated.
Use of INTLTOOL_POLICY_RULE in Makefile.am to merge translations into
the polkit action file necessitates increasing the minimum version of
intltool to 0.36.0 where it was first introduced in intltool.m4. This
will prevent GParted building on RedHat/CentOS 5 which only has intltool
0.35.0. But that doesn't matter because RedHat/CentOS 5 reached end of
life on 31st March 2017.
[1] GNU Coding Standards, 7.2.5 Variables for Installation Directories
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Directory-Variables
[2] Automake Manual, 27.10 Installing to Hard-Coded Locations
https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Hard_002dCoded-Install-Paths
"My package needs to populate the installation directory of another
package at install-time. I can easily compute that installation
directory in configure, but if I install files therein,
'make distcheck' fails. How else should I do?"
[3] polkit(8), Declaring Actions
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit.8.html#polkit-declaring-actions
"A mechanism need to declare a set of actions in order to use
polkit. Actions correspond to operations that clients can request
the mechanism to carry out and are defined in XML files that the
mechanism installs into the /usr/share/polkit-1/actions directory."
[4] Not installing to hard-coded locations vs polkit's fixed location
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2017-08/msg00015.html
Bug 776437 - GParted fails to run as root under Wayland
Mike Fleetwood