[gentoo-dev] Re: Add bc back to the stage3

[Steven J. Long]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2014, Luca Barbato wrote:
> On 17/09/14 14:09, Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
> > On Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Luca Barbato wrote:
> >
> >> The bc utility is part of the posix tools and it might be used to build
> >> linux among the other stuff.
> >
> > Luca,
> >
> > bc is not in the system set and is a dependency of the kernel or any
> > other package that needs it, so why do we need to include a package that
> > takes ~20 seconds to build?
>
> Because I'd expect a stage3 to be posix compliant and it is a pain to
> remember that Gentoo doesn't have it by default (since the errors can be
> quite vague).
>

I agree; ed should be supplied too for the same reason (and not be
considered as a provider for the virtual.) It's a pita not being able to
rely on a POSIX.2 base.

Similarly with vi/ex too (again, not providing the virtual); though vim
should likely be another package, unless it's much easier just to bundle
it. AFAIR you get into all the gvim/X questions then, but I can't say as
I use it, so defer to whomever. ex is useful for scripters, though we
use ed more, since it avoids the vi question and we've had reports of
ex not being as reliable as ed, on other platforms.

busybox ed should never be built afaic. GNU ed has tight linkage for
rootfs usage (like sed and awk, which should be in /bin), and actually
works:
$ ldd $(type -p ed)
  linux-vdso.so.1
  libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6
  /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Regards,
steveL
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