Arch Linux

Passim is a hard dependency for fwupd at the moment, and many are concerned by the fact that Passim has a hard requirement on Avahi, and that Avahi is auto-activated by Passim without the user's explicit say-so. While not malicious, many users do not want mDNS and/or Avahi running on their system for any number of reasons (such as using systemd-resolved for mDNS), and likewise, the only reason Passim is on the system in the first place is to facilitate the fwupd dependency.

In a bug report to Richard Hughes (the author of Passim and fwupd), he mentioned that Fedora packages Passim and Passim-libs as separate packages, with fwupd being dependent only on the Passim-libs package to satisfy the libpassim.so dependency. Likewise, in Richard's own words: "In Fedora, passim-libs is installed by default, but the passim package (the daemon) is only installed when wanted. Can arch split up the passim package like that too?"

https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/6179


Would it be possible to follow Fedora's lead here and split up the packaging, and make Passim a user opt-in package/service?