Ian Stakenvicius posted on Fri, 08 Apr 2016 10:50:24 -0400 as excerpted: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA256 > > On 08/04/16 10:33 AM, M. J. Everitt wrote: >> I'll come back to the links a bit later, but is policykit and its >> predecessor/derivatives now a mandatory part of a linux system? >> >> Possibly crossing posts here, so apologies in advance .. ! :] >> >> > polkit is only required/mandatory AFAIK in relation to dbus, which, > at least for now and at least for non-systemd systems, is also > technically optional. And even within a dbus-managed environment I'm > not sure if it's absolutely mandatory, tbh.
Polkit doesn't seem to be necessary here. Systemd (if you're using it) does want (need I believe) dbus, but nothing I'm running, including kde- plasma5 as my desktop, actually requires polkit. Gentoo/kde folks strongly recommend polkit, and I believe it's required by some normal runtime-only dependencies such as the device-notifier and auto-mounter (solid's hardware-detect functionality), via the runtime- only udisks2 (script) dependencies, but udisks2 pulls in all sorts of deps that I don't want, and because udisks2 is a runtime-only script dep, and I don't need nor want or need that automounting functionality in any case, I simply created a stub ebuild for it in my overlay that doesn't actually install any files or have any dependencies. (Of course the old way to do that, via package.provided, can work as well, but it's deprecated, so a month or so ago I switched all package.provided packages to null-packages in my overlay.) Problem solved. No polkit, etc, deps, and inserted storage behaves like I want it to and waits until I issue a mount command or the like, before mounting. =:^) Starting dolphin or gwenview complains to the journald (or syslog, I'm not sure which as it's syslog I actually monitor, with journald set to session-only tmpfs files) about a missing udisks2 dbus service or some such, but they still work, and I configured syslog-ng to filter those messages to /dev/null. =:^) So polkit is definitely not required, even with systemd, dbus, and a kde- plasma5 desktop, tho the latter will require jumping thru some hoops to stub out runtime-only deps. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
