commit df6261665b0291a14fd46ec960d4fbebc737777d
Author: Fabio Fantoni <fantonifabio@tiscali.it>
Date: Tue Sep 22 14:14:59 2026 +0200
d/control: recommend nm-applet and mate-polkit for the fallback session
cinnamon-launcher starts two more helpers when it brings up the fallback
session after a Cinnamon crash: nm-applet, for a network icon in the
panel tray, and the first PolicyKit agent it finds among the
polkit-gnome and polkit-mate ones. Both were missing on Debian:
network-manager-applet is not pulled in by anything (cinnamon only
depends on nm-connection-editor), and policykit-1-gnome no longer exists
in unstable, so of the three paths the launcher probes only mate-polkit
can provide one. Unlike metacity and the panel, these two helpers sit
behind a shutil.which()/Path.exists() guard, so their absence was
silent: the fallback simply had no network icon and no way to answer an
authentication prompt.
Verified in a sid VM with 6.6.9-3 that neither of them interferes with a
normal session. nm-applet never starts: cinnamon-session lists it in the
autostart-blacklist gsettings key, so its /etc/xdg/autostart file is
skipped even though it is not excluded by NotShowIn. mate-polkit is not
blacklisted and does get launched, but Cinnamon registers as the
PolicyKit agent first and the MATE one exits immediately with "An
authentication agent already exists for the given subject", leaving one
line in ~/.xsession-errors. In the fallback session both run as
intended, the network icon shows up in the tint2 tray, the MATE agent
registers successfully now that Cinnamon is gone, and restarting
Cinnamon from the crash dialog terminates all of them.
The cost is about 16 MB, of which 15 MB is the gnome-icon-theme that
network-manager-applet recommends; mate-polkit and mate-polkit-common
are 582 KB and pull in nothing else.
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5
Among the 8 debian patches available in version 6.6.9-3 of the package, we noticed the following issues:
![[bug history graph]](https://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/c/cinnamon.png){kind=link}