Re: [gentoo-user] Why busybox?

[Ashley Dixon]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 10:53:50AM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> Why does portage insist on installing busybox for me?

BusyBox is just a minimal set of utilities which would be useful for rescuing a
system, or to be used on an embedded system with extreme limitations. There's
not really any reason to remove this, but if you insist...

> As far as I know the only use for it on a desktop system is for
> initramfs.  I have no initramfs, therefore I have no need for busybox.
> I unmerged it and nothing bad happened except for a warning from portage
> that it is part of my profile set.  I went ahead and ignored the
> warning.
>
> But now I updated the tree and emerge -p shows it will be installed
> again.  Why is that?  The only reverse dependencies are virtuals which
> are satisfied in other ways, like virtual/awk.  So is it the profile
> thing?  But I have done the same with other profile packages (notably
> editors/nano) and those are _not_ coming back.

Read more about profiles at [1]; a guide to making custom profiles can be found
as a subsection. Portage's attempts to reinstall BusyBox is not unexpected
behaviour, as the "profile" defines a core set of packages which should be
installed for a particular use case (e.g., desktop profiles mandate an X
server). Thus, when you invoke Portage to do a full overhaul, it interprets
anything defined in the profile which is not installed on the system to be an
error which needs to be rectified.

If you really don't want to have Portage install BusyBox, see the --exclude
option of emerge. But again, there's really no need to remove BusyBox unless
you're _very_ short on disk space.

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Profile_(Portage)

-- 

Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk

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