Re: [gentoo-dev] sys-libs/zlib: punt from system in profiles

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tuesday 29 November 2011 21:14:49 Matt Turner wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> > we have USE=zlib already which should cover automatically pulling in zlib
> > when necessary, and we have that by default in make.conf.  so there's no
> > need to explicitly list zlib as part of the system target.  so time to
> > drop it.
>
> I don't object to this, but just to satisfy my curiosity, what are the
> effects of removing, say, zlib or readline from the system profile?
> It'd be very difficult if not impossible to construct a system without
> these. The only effect I've noticed from changes like these are that
> sometimes the packages will be depcleaned from stage3 tarballs if
> nothing has them in RDEPEND.

you should be able to USE='-readline -zlib' and, for the most part, not have 
them get used.  certainly for readline, almost nothing in the core (or much of 
the tree) uses it -- if we ignore bash because it bundles a copy of readline.

i also want to keep it simple for slimmed down systems, and to keep the "core" 
set as small as possible for older systems during upgrade paths.
-mike