[gentoo-dev] DEPENDing on system components

[Dan Armak]

Hi all,

Can someone enlighten me: why DEPEND/RDEPEND on packages which are *always* 
present on the system, and are even pre-built in build snapshots? For example 
some ebuilds explicitly depend on virtual/glibc, what's the point in that? 
Many ebuilds use things like flex bison etc. to compile. When creating 
non-critical, non-system ebuilds which certainly won't be built before glibc 
or the kernel - should I keep track of these things?

-- 

Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer
Matan, Israel