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

[NTS]

Dear All,

I agree totally to cut down on dependencies and unused daemons to
reduce attack surface.  Feel free to upvote this CUPS issue about its
colord dependency upstream:

    https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/193

BTW if the polkit service is not running then libvirtd won't start VMs
(as root by virsh interface).  Sometimes also `systemd` will not shut
down or reboot the system when asked to (it checks by using polkit
whether root may shutdown/reboot the system lol).

Best regards,

NTS

On Sun, 30 May 2021 at 12:32, Neven Sajko via arch-general
<arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 30 May 2021 at 02:51, Eli Schwartz via arch-general
> <arch-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:
> > /usr/lib/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/printbackends/libprintbackend-cups.so directly
> > links to libcolord and will fail to load if it is unavailable. But
> > perhaps you used a different printbackend...
>
> I don't have LPRNG, so CUPS must have been used AFAIK. Also note that
> I deleted just the polkit package from my system, NOT the colord
> package.
>
> > - libcolord to satisfy programs linking to colord
> > - colord to run the daemon which libcolord tries to send messages to
>
> I hope the colord package gets split, then!
>
> > idk how that would work, since /usr/bin/colord has a shared library link
> > to libpolkit-gobject-1.so.0
>
> I thought maybe dlopen could be used instead.
>
> > > 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.
> >
> > I didn't stumble across any relevant deletion requests. What were the
> > exact package names?
>
> I just checked the history of the GTK wiki page, and back in September
> 2017 these relevant packages were on AUR, none of which seem to exist
> now:
> gtk3-light
> gtk3-nobroadway-nowayland-nocolord
> gtk3-print-backends-nocolord
> colord-nopolkit
>
> Thanks,
> Neven