Please adjust dependencies so that policykit-1-gnome can be demoted to universe

[Jeremy Bícha]

The Ubuntu Desktop Team would like to get policykit-1-gnome demoted to universe since it is no longer used in the default install. (See its package description.)

I believe screen-resolution-extra is the last thing holding that package in main.

gnome-shell provides polkit-1-auth-agent. You can see provides and reverse depends for a virtual package by running
$ apt-cache showpkg polkit-1-auth-agent

In my experience with demoting xterm to universe, it looked to me like Ubuntu's germinate doesn't handle virtual packages and alternate dependencies very well. I ended up having to put gnome-terminal as the first dependency in the list of alternates.

Suggestion 1
------------
Change screen-resolution-extra's dependency to:
gnome-shell | policykit-1-gnome | polkit-1-auth-agent

Suggestion 2
------------
Change nvidia-settings to Suggest instead of Depend on screen-resolution-extra. From the package's description, it sounds like screen-resolution-extra is not useful for a default Ubuntu install? If so, we can demote both screen-resolution-extra and policykit-1-gnome to universe.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Both screen-resolution-extra and update-manager are arch: all packages.

This might be a problem for demoting policykit-1-gnome to universe since gnome-shell isn't available on s390x and there aren't any other alternatives in main. As long as it's arch: all, we can't make the dependency only apply to !s390x.

We might need to just drop the dependency completely. Or we can make those packages arch: any.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

The main reason for depending on polkit is that nvidia-settings needs root privileges to write the xorg.conf, while also storing user preferences (in the user home directory). This why running the whole app as root is not recommended.

While I think, in the future (in a fully Wayland world), we can drop all of this, I am fine with suggestion 1 for now.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package screen-resolution-extra - 0.17.4

---------------
screen-resolution-extra (0.17.4) disco; urgency=medium

  * debian/control:
    - Add optional dependency on gnome-shell (LP: #1815374).

 -- Alberto Milone <email address hidden> Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:16:47 +0100