Re: [gentoo-dev] remove system set?

[Doug Goldstein]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:05 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> From that angle, if you wouldd remove the system set, would you add its
>> contents to the Portage ebuild?  Portage itself doesn't need a compiler
>> or might not need gawk, but whatever it runs (ebuilds) often need so.
>
> Nope - I'd add them to every ebuild, and only where needed.  That's
> the whole point.
>
>>
>> Adding libc, a compiler, linker, shell, etc. to almost any every ebuild
>> looks pretty much useless to me.  Adding deps for all regular tools an
>> ebuild uses (bash, sed, awk, cut, wc, ...) seems like error-prone and
>> pretty much useless to me as well.  So, there is the system set which
>> just is the central place where those packages are recorded.
>
> It is only useful for situations where people want to do something
> unusual.  Some would argue that this is the only situation where
> Gentoo is useful.  If I wanted a system just like everybody else's I
> guess I'd run Ubuntu, if not Windows or OSX.
>
> In any case, I do agree that getting there is associated with pain.  I
> just like to think that getting there "someday" would be nice.  I know
> that a systematic effort exists in mathematics to try to reduce all of
> math to a minimum set of axioms and have everything else be formally
> derived.  I consider that a thing of beauty, even if I don't care to
> read the two volumes necessary to get to 1+1=2.
>
> Rich
>

The other point of the system set is to get rid of the chicken and egg
problem. For example, virtually every package in the system set ships
as a tar, including tar itself. All the compression utilities ship as
tars, which need to be installed to build tar (think -z, -j, -J). You
need a standard C library to run virtually everything including tar,
which you need to extract your standard C sources. The list goes on.


-- 
Doug Goldstein