[arch-general] How to enable Archlinux users to easily avoid Polkit?

[Neven Sajko]

Hi

On my up-to-date Archlinux system, the only package that depends on
Polkit is Colord, which, in turn, is only depended on by GTK3.

Forcefully removing the Polkit package (with pacman -R
--assume-installed polkit polkit), works fine: after doing it, I
rebooted and printed a page from Chromium (which uses GTK3 for this)
on my black-and-white printer over USB.

It would be very nice to give Arch and GTK3 users like me the
opportunity to avoid Polkit without hassle.

The only idea I got is to move polkit from depends to optdepends in
the colord package, and add post_install and post_upgrade messages
saying something like:

> WARNING: install polkit if you plan on actually using colord!

Do others agree that this would be more good than bad? In any case,
I'm not a Pacman expert, so I'm hoping somebody can come up with an
even better solution?

Tangentially, what are the chances of convincing upstream to relax the
Colord dependency on Polkit? Could such a patch get accepted?

BTW, does somebody know what happened to the packages for building
GTK3 without Colord, building Colord without Polkit, and similar? I
think those were available on AUR previosuly.

Regards,
Neven