Sounds like the code in consolekit.c is not properly guarded with #ifdefs, which would be set when dbus-tqt is found.
Is there any good reason that dbus might not be available on a target distribution/system? If not, I would say to just make dbus a tdebase dependency and remove the if statements from around the dbus checks. If there is a good reason for dbus to be missing, then we will need to add another flag to build without dbus support and also add the requisite #ifdefs to the tdm consolekit code.
Thoughts?
The temporary patch now does that by removing the if( WITH_HAL ) test and presuming the existence of dbus-tqt, which doesn't build without dbus. As patched, the remainder of the cmake checks will halt the build with an error message when dbus-tqt is not found. I don't know the future plans for dbus, but for now I believe all distros still support and maintain dbus.
Perhaps someday a WITH_DBUS=NO flag or #ifdef qualifiers might be needed, but that day is not today.
On the other hand, the absence of HAL is very real today and the WITH_HAL=NO option is necessary for many distros.
Darrell