On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:41:54PM -0500, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 06:14:06AM +0200, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 05:58:56 +0200
> > Jeroen Roovers <jer@g.o> wrote:
> > 
> > > Judging from [1], a couple of thousands of ebuilds DEPEND on
> > > sys-apps/sed, which is a system package (in profiles/base/packages)
> > > since at least 2004. It boils down to some 2535 ebuilds, 1409 packages
> > > and 14 eclasses, some requiring a version as high as 4.0.5, which went
> > > stable in 2003.
>  
>  Since sys-apps/sed is a system package, I would vote for removing the
>  dependency from the ebuilds/eclasses.

The implicit system set dependency thing really, really needs to die; 
at the time of the rule, portage couldn't handle resolving graphs of 
that sort.  PM resolvers for gentoo are generally a fair bit saner 
now thus doing what you're suggesting isn't really beneficial (frankly 
it causes some issues for stages, as zac noted).

~brian