When you don't specify supportPermissions(true) to a store and try to perform permissions operations you should have a error message as follows:

PLIDM000800: No PermissionStore configuration found for requested permission operation.

Maybe your configuration is not correct (jpa entities, etc) as described in PLINK-589. In this case, both true/false will fail. But with different messages.

I'm changing docs to provide more info about how to configure the JPA store with permissions. Also, I'm going to provide a default entity mapping in picketlink-idm-simple-schema specific for permissions.