In bug 841451 it was reported that gdm was malfunctioning when polkitd failed to start. While that specific bug was about a defect, polkit applications generally should not cease to work just because the org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 D-Bus service is not available. I actually recently added a section about this to http://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit-apps.html here it is DO make sure your application works even when the org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 D-Bus service is not available (this can happen if polkitd(8) is not installed or if the polkit.service systemd unit/service has been masked). If you are using the libpolkit-gobject-1 library this means handling polkit_authority_get_sync() or polkit_authority_get_finish() returning NULL or polkit_authority_check_authorization() / polkit_authority_check_authorization_sync() failing with an error not in the POLKIT_ERROR domain. An appropriate way of dealing with the polkit authority not being available, could be to allow only uid 0 to perform operations, forbid all operations or something else.
GDM doesn't use polkit. I'm guessing the issue was: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681067 If not, this is likely a gnome-shell bug which one of us should file upstream.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle. Changing version to '19'. (As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 19 End Of Life. Thank you.) More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora19
This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '19'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version. Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not able to fix it before Fedora 19 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete.
Fedora 19 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2015-01-06. Fedora 19 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.