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

[Nick Shvelidze]

> 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?

I don't think this is a good idea, the only solution I can think of is
to separate libcolord from colord and have GTK depend on libcolord,
like on Debian

On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 3:11 PM Neven Sajko via arch-general
<arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> 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