On 11/29/2011 06:14 PM, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
>> we have USE=zlib already which should cover automatically pulling in zlib when
>> necessary, and we have that by default in make.conf.  so there's no need to
>> explicitly list zlib as part of the system target.  so time to drop it.
>> -mike
> 
> I don't object to this, but just to satisfy my curiosity, what are the
> effects of removing, say, zlib or readline from the system profile?
> It'd be very difficult if not impossible to construct a system without
> these. The only effect I've noticed from changes like these are that
> sometimes the packages will be depcleaned from stage3 tarballs if
> nothing has them in RDEPEND.
> 
> Are there any other cases?

One nice thing about removing them from the system profile is that it
allows for greater parallelization with emerge --jobs, since packages
that's aren't in the system set don't trigger the code for bug 256616
[1] which limits parallelization as a safety precaution.

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256616
-- 
Thanks,
Zac