Zac Medico posted on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:29:20 -0800 as excerpted:

> 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

And a VERY nice benefit that is, too. =:^)

Except, don't dependencies of system profile packages get the same safety 
precaution applied, and at the level we're talking here, zlib, etc, 
aren't such packages going to almost certainly be dependencies of @system 
on a normal system, even if they're not in @system itself?

If so, that's a relatively limited benefit in most cases.

Meanwhile, the better flexibility in terms of embedded is the benefit 
that immediately comes to mind here.  From what I've read, gentoo is 
quite popular with embedded, and a lot of embedded folks go to a lot of 
work to remove "unnecessary" packages from the system set.  If it's 
possible to do that at the general gentoo level without too much trouble 
and without affecting general system target functionality, it's surely 
going to save a lot of embedded folks a lot of duplicated effort, over 
time.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman