> Zac Medico wrote:
> 
> I think what most people want is for portage not to pull in a package
> that nothing uses.  I'm not a dev nor a programmer but I have yet to see
> any good reason for installing something that is not being used.  It's
> not being tested to see if it is stable.  It would have to be used
> before that would happen.  Basically, it is just one more package to
> update and taking up hard drive space.  It's not doing anything else.
> 
> As for slots, if something needs it, portage would pull in the new
> slot.  That's what portage does.  It just seems in this case it is
> pulling in a new slot that nothing uses.

Have you considered that they might possibly be hundreds of packages that you 
have installed providing functionality that you never use, but are only there 
as a fixed dependencies of something that you do. 

Hell lets take it even further than that, i'm sure there are thousands of 
lines of code in most packages that you will never hit,  so why dont we start 
"masking" them as well. 

I don't recall ever using grep --version,  please remove (mask) that code from 
grep.  We will obviously need someway to unmask those code masks so lets 
create a couple of files for portage.  Hows....

code.mask and code.unmask with a format of....

package path/to/file line1 line2 line3 line4



Or maybe we could just let users who don't want to install python-3 mask it 
_locally_.  Once they need it portage is more than capable of telling them 
that.

> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-)