[gentoo-dev] Re: [rfc] drop iputils from @system (i.e. ping)

[Duncan]

Mike Frysinger posted on Wed, 14 Oct 2015 23:39:55 -0400 as excerpted:

> iputils is currently in @system for everyone.  by default, it only
> installs `ping`.  do we feel strongly enough about this to require all
> systems include it ?  or should this wait for the long idea of releasing
> stage4's instead of stage3's ?
> -mike

Talking about iputils...

What recently changed that previously pulled in iputils as a depend (of 
what type I'm not sure)?

As I've occasionally posted, I negate every @system entry in 
/etc/portage/profile/packages, effectively giving me an empty @system set 
(which depclean warns about, the way I know that the cascaded @system 
list hasn't been updated, forcing me to update my negations).

But until a week or so ago, something was apparently still pulling iputils 
in as a dependency, as it wasn't in any of my sets included in 
world_sets, yet was still not depcleaned.  A week or so ago that changed, 
and depclean wanted to remove it, but I decided it was useful enough that 
I wanted to keep it, so added it to the appropriate set that's included 
in my world_sets file, so depclean no longer wants to remove it.

But I still don't know what was previously pulling in iputils as a dep, 
that no longer does so now.

IOW, at least for me, the whole subject of the thread wouldn't have 
mattered until very recently, since something else was evidently pulling 
in iputils as a dep.  Only now that it's no longer doing so, does normal 
iputils listing in @system, that I've actually negated here along with 
the rest of @system listings, actually come into play.

So what was that dep, and what are the circumstances surrounding its 
removal as a dep?  I'm curious as to what triggered the whole change in 
status in the first place.

(Tho obviously I wasn't curious enough to go scrounging thru the git logs 
and updated packages between that update and the previous one, to find 
out what it was that way.  But now that it has come up here, I thought 
I'd ask, as there's obviously some backstory that could prove interesting 
to the discussion, that people with intact @systems probably would have 
never noticed.)

-- 
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