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

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 29 May 2021 18:32:29 +0400, Nick Shvelidze via arch-general
wrote:
>> 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

Btw. I'm not that allergic to polkit as the OP is. It's installed on my
machine, but actually not working for all packages. However, it likely
is useful for some software I'm using and it doesn't matter that it
fails for some other software, that I anyway use or used with root
privileges via command line, ocztoolbox comes to mind, a package from
AUR, still installed, but I'm anyway in favour of running
/usr/local/bin/kioxia_ssd_utility/SSDUtility, since ocztoolbox doesn't
show my new kioxia ssds, while
/usr/local/bin/kioxia_ssd_utility/SSDUtility does show them and the old
ocz ssds, too.
If I should have missed, that polkit is also not useful for my usage,
then it at least doesn't harm my computer usage, so I don't feel the
need to remove it by a workaround.

_But_ there are a lot of packages that require at least gvfs or
pulseaudio as a hard dependency, while those packages could require
them as an optional dependency instead, they still would work. Making
them a hard dependency could be an issue for some computer usage. I
can't comment on polkit, other than some packges depend on it, but
polkit still doesn't do it's job for some of those packages.