some questions about policykit

[Adel Ahmed]

I've been having problems mounting partitions, changing brightness...etc

I was taking a look at the polkit actions under /usr/share/polkit-1/actions, trying to fix these problems
the strange thing was changing the actions next to the allow_active had no effect!!!
changing allow_inactive fixed everything, which is very strange considering I am the active user If I understand that concept correctly, the active user is the user currently logged in to the tty of the system(not some remote session)
localhost actions # who
adel tty1 2014-12-18 11:28
adel pts/0 2014-12-18 11:28 (:0.0)
adel pts/1 2014-12-18 11:28 (:0.0)
adel pts/2 2014-12-18 11:35 (:0.0)

I'm using no login manager, automatic login from getty and xfce4 using the .xinitrc file:
exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch

am I doing something wrong? have I misunderstood something?
I'm not after a fix, everything is working fine, I want to understand how things are working currently

thanks

[ppurka]

I don't think you are the only one. The *kits have some of the most convoluted documentations/implementation and there is no way for a user to decipher how they truly behave from their documentations.
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emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using kde5 | e is unstable :-/

[Adel Ahmed]

I'll work on understanding polkit, It's just not on top of my priority list

[depontius]

I recently started removing it. The system I'm using is *kit free, my wife's still has them - for now.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[Adel Ahmed]

I was using a polkit free environment, till password prompts started annoying me, I do plan to go ahead without them not at the moment though