Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Implicit system dependency

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o> wrote:
>
> Sorry Zac, I posted my reply before I read this.  This is essentially the
> point I was making.  However, I think this will be cumbersome.  With the
> current way we do things, its easy to delete packages from @system by just
> doing '-*sys-apps/man-pages' (for example) in a profile's packages file.  It
> is not so easy to delete from a DEPEND string, so I foresee some tricky if
> logic here.
>

Appreciating that we're on a slight tangent, why are these packages
typically removed?  Were they ever truly dependencies?  I can't
imagine too many packages breaking if man-pages isn't present.

If we went the virtual route I would suggest that we end up having a
few meta-virtuals.  There would be the lazy dependency virtual that
pulls in stuff like gcc/libc/posix/etc.  There would be a virtual that
pulls in useful-to-user stuff like ssh/man-pages/etc.  Then there
would be a virtual that pulls in both of the other virtuals.  Ebuilds
would only pull in the dependency virtual.

I agree that this would involve a fair bit of work, though I imagine
it could be done without any changes to portage insofar as testing
things out goes (just create a virtual, stick it in @system in a
profile, and test away).

--
Rich