On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> it isn't just circular deps.  it's also about breaking alternatives and
> useless bloat.  adding "coreutils" to their depend because they execute `mv`,
> or "sed" because they execute `sed`, etc... is absolutely pointless.  same
> goes for virtual/libc or virtual/os-headers.

Perhaps pointless, but likely harmless as well.  I wasn't suggesting
that we should systematically add @system deps - only that we
shouldn't systematically remove them either unless they cause harm.

When I think about the use cases for reduced @system, I think that
listing them in RDEPEND probably has more utility than having them in
DEPEND.  It usually matters more on minimal systems that the packages
in the run state are smaller, and the build state often doesn't matter
as much (consider something installed into a chroot using
crossdev/etc).  Coreutils is obviously an extreme example, although
even that could be replaced by something like busybox.  Then again,
unless somebody makes a virtual for it I don't think that trying to
put that in an RDEPEND gets us anywhere.

Bottom line is that if somebody has a reason for sticking an @system
package in (R)DEPEND I don't see the need to treat it as a bug, unless
it actually causes harm beyond 30 more bytes in block tail space for
something in /usr/portage.

Just my two cents...

Rich