KDE 6 release: D-Bus and Polkit galore

The SUSE security team restricts the installation of system wide D-Bus services and Polkit policies in openSUSE distributions and derived SUSE products. Any package that ships these features needs to be reviewed by us first, before it can be added to production repositories.

In November, openSUSE KDE packagers approached us with a long list of KDE components for an upcoming KDE6 major release. The packages needed adjusted D-Bus and Polkit whitelistings due to renamed interfaces or other breaking changes. Looking into this many components at once was a unique experience that also led to new insights, which will be discussed in this article.

For readers that are new to D-Bus and/or Polkit, the following sections offer a summary to get a better idea about these systems.

Matthias Gerstner

You don't get these kinds of in-depth looks at how a major new release like KDE 6 gets implemented in a popular distribution like openSUSE. What's especially crazy is that this only really covers D-Bus and Polkit, and those are just two of the countless aspects of openSUSE affected by KDE 6.