On Wed, 2023-02-15 at 08:31 +0100, Robin Candau wrote:

 - 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).

/etc/pacman.conf

NoExtract   = usr/bin/sudo

While that would technically work, the sudo package is composed of way more than just this binary file (`pacman -Ql sudo`). This is basically the same thing as what Polarian did initially (`doas rm /usr/bin/sudo`), which is only a partial removal of the `sudo` package; hence why I would not recommended it personally (specifically for people that "do not want sudo on their system").

You could eventually list all of the files installed by sudo via the `pacman -Ql sudo` output and put them in a "NoExtract" statement in the pacman.conf file but note that this list can change over time and that you'll still get the `sudo` package listed as installed (which can be an issue and a breakages source with certain packages depending how they're looking for sudo).

Or... you can simply run `pacman -Rdd sudo` at each `base-devel` update to completely/properly remove it (which, once again, should be fairly rare) 😁.

Note that, regarding the current `base-devel` situation, I do not recommend any of those two "solutions", which should both be used at your own risks.

-- 
Regards,
Robin Candau