Hello,

I think quite a few people are not going to be surprised about this, but this is a major issue now.

Having base-devel converted to a meta package is horrible, I can no longer get rid of sudo as it causes package conflicts and pacman will not allow the removal of it.

I do not want sudo on my system, yay has stopped working with doas now, because it prioritises sudo and only resorts to doas (and then su if doas does not exist) if sudo does not exist, but because sudo will exist for everyone who wants to build AUR packages, yay is completely broken for me.

[...]

I will submit an issue to yay now and hope they implement a solution fast.

Le 15/02/2023 à 03:08, Polarian a écrit :
I forgot to mention, if you really don't want sudo, just do:
doas rm /usr/bin/sudo

As stated in the associated Arch wiki page [1], AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. According to this, I don't think the fact that `base-devel` switching to a meta package "breaks*" an AUR helper (only for `doas` users that do not want to use `sudo` at all in this case, additionally) will be taken as a legit reason to make the switch back, on its own. That also means that if there's any work to do regarding your current situation/concern (prioritize `doas` over `sudo` when using `yay`), it will indeed have to be done on `yay` side (as you already claimed by saying you'll submit an issue to `yay`, this is just a confirmation 😁).
*As a side note, I don't think the fact that `yay` preferring using `sudo` over `doas` by default can/should be considered a "breakage".

For what it's worth, the decision to switch to a meta package has been taken regarding the fact that group packages won't pull new members automatically to users (in contrary of meta packages), which has been an issue regarding `base-devel` when the `debugedit` package has been recently added to the its members [2].

Now, if one really don't want `sudo` installed on their machine, they could just force its removal using `pacman` (please, use this method instead of simply removing the `sudo` binary from your system):
`pacman -Rdd sudo`

Important notes though:
- According to the way meta packages work (which is actually the reason why we made the switch), `sudo` will be pulled back to your system at each `base-devel` updates (which I assume shouldn't happen too frequently though).
- This is obviously not recommended [3], do this at your own risks.

I hope this helps :)

-- 
Regards,
Robin Candau