On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 06:02:12PM +0100, Achim Gottinger wrote:

> I allways thought sys contains everything required to build itself and
> everythin required for a minimum runtime system.  perl is needed to build
> some of the sys packages, thats why it is there.  python is not required for
> building and not for runtime, so it is not there.

You are correct that if we need a package that's used in rebuilding the system,
it's included in sys.  But, this isn't the *only* way we select packages for
sys.  All the packages in sys-devel, sys-apps, sys-kernel and sys-libs make up
the "base" system.  My goals for the base system are to provide a reasonably
complete, fully-functional basic Linux system.  There are a lot of things in
sys that aren't really needed, such as man pages and the "bc" utility.  But
they're included because they are useful and popular things that are very
helpful to Linux users (and expected to be available).  Rather than think of
sys as "everything required for a minimum runtime system", think of it as
"everything you'd expect to find in a basic but fully-functional (and useful)
console-based Linux system".  If someone needs a "stripped sys" (for a special
project), it's easy enough to remove the packages that aren't needed (or use a
build list to avoid building/merging them in the first place).

> If you insist in having python in sys.tbz2 I can include a version compiled
> without use tcl-tk in the sys.tbz2 but dev-lang is the place. :-)

Well, one of the nice things about being the Chief Architect is that I never
need to insist :)  I'll wait for further comments.  The two alternatives I'm
considering are the python-x11 package and the "rebuild it for X support"
solution.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@g.o>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.