Re: [gentoo-dev] Packages that explicitly DEPEND on sys-apps/sed

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Brian Harring <ferringb@×××××.com> wrote:
> The implicit system set dependency thing really, really needs to die;
> at the time of the rule, portage couldn't handle resolving graphs of
> that sort.  PM resolvers for gentoo are generally a fair bit saner
> now thus doing what you're suggesting isn't really beneficial (frankly
> it causes some issues for stages, as zac noted).

++

It seems to me that the best policy would be for every package to just
list all its dependencies, and then users are free to run the default
experience that includes everything in @system, or a more trimmed-down
experience.  Plus, from time to time there is some debate about
removing some package from @system and the only way to figure out what
it breaks is a long discussion on -dev and lots of tinderbox testing,
and then lots of ebuilds being modified to add the dependency back in.
 With explicit dependencies it is trivial to determine.

And no, I don't think that Gentoo should fully support reduced-@system
builds, but there is no harm in making them more of a viable option.

Rich