Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage suggestion

[Patrick Kursawe]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 01:24:21PM +0100, Timo Lindemann wrote:

> Everytime I install a Gentoo on a system, I curse and scream about one of
> the major flaws in portage.

Quite a promising start...

[ ... gnome-libs requiring esound ... ]

> Okay, I think. Lets emerge all that shit, and get over with.
> Next thing, I want licq. I pretend. Guess what appears on the list? artsd!
> I cant stand it, really.

I can't reproduce it. 
USE="-arts -kde" emerge -epv licq | grep arts
gives nothing. Could you please try to use emerge -epv ... to check what
pulls in artsd?

> Gentoo would be such a nice distro, but it is ALL BLOATED.

Screaming isn't very helpful here.

> Let there be
> a mode for Portage where all CRITICAL dependencies are shown, what the
> program I want NEEDS to run.

That is what the USE flags and the DEPEND/RDEPEND entries in the ebuilds
were invented for.

> I dont want to have an entire OS installed if I just want one program.
> artsd is not a dep from licq,
> but somehow entagled in that kde thing, which I dont WANT to have. So, a
> distinction needs to be
> made between USEFUL deps, or standard deps, and CRITICAL deps, or needed
> deps.
>
> What do you think?

I think that the system is already there. The problem is that there's no
standardized way how a program can tell what it needs, so this is up to the
developer who writes the ebuild. Developers (as far as I know) are humans.
Humans make mistakes. That's why there sometimes are DEPENDs which are not
really needed. That's why there sometimes are no DEPENDs which would
actually be needed.

Perhaps this is the point where you should think about this, stop
complaining and start improving gentoo by giving useful bug reports
(http://bugs.gentoo.org) for those packages that have wrong dependencies or
that do not respect USE flags they should be aware of.

Just an idea,

Patrick