[gentoo-dev] Re: Questions about SystemD and OpenRC

[Duncan]

Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:27:41 -0400 as excerpted:

> Right now having decent KDE and Gnome support with all the bells and
> whistles[...] isn't that hard, [It] will likely get harder, which means
> in practice what we'll probably have is a reasonable compromise which
> will never be quite as polished in any one direction as it could be,
> unless the end user does the polishing.

Well stated.

> RE you concerns about OpenRC being in @system.  Personally I'm a fan of
> getting rid of @system entirely except as something used to build
> install CDs or having some sets for convenience in building systems. It
> only exists for a few reasons that I can think of:
> 1.  Devs don't want to have ebuilds that capture dependencies on every
> little thing.  A few well-chosen virtuals like "shell utilities" or
> whatever might help with this.
> 2.  Things like Prefix rely on the system not installing local copies of
> libraries in the core system it needs to link to.  Careful use of
> package.provided in profiles might address this.
> 3.  We'd need many more virtuals to handle situations like FreeBSD where
> people don't what GNU on their systems.  Right now if they are system
> packages they just define system appropriately and ebuilds don't
> directly pull in the GNU stuff anyway.

AFAIK, @system also helps resolve a few nasty circular dependencies.  In 
fact, I believe that's it's primary purpose.  As such I'm not sure it's 
practical (as opposed to possible, cost/benefit simply makes it 
impractical) to entirely get rid of, but it does occur to me that sets 
would be an interesting way to go.  Define a few sets that together 
compose @system as we have it today, and basically package.provide them 
during the bootstrap phase.

AFAIK the original stage tarball also contains a minimal installed tree, 
for similar reasons.  I'm not actually sure how they interact.  That'd be 
releng/arch/catalyst territory.

-- 
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