Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Reducing the size of the system package set

[Petteri Räty]

Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò kirjoitti:
> Here comes the official proposal, copy and paste from my blog with an
> extra post scriptum at the end.
>
> I already ranted about the fact that the dependency tree of our ebuilds
> is vastly incomplete, as many lack dependency on zlib; trying to get
> this fixed was impossible, as Donnie and other insisted that as zlib was
> in system, we shouldn’t depend on it at all. I disagree, and I would
> like to know why we can’t depend on a system package, but whatever.

At least one reason is that otherwise lots of ebuild submissions would 
have coreutils/gcc/libc/whatever in DEPEND/RDEPEND.

>
> But why autoconf and automake? Well the easy answer is that those are
> often used without making sure they are depended upon explicitly… or at
> least this was the case till me and Martin added autotools.eclass to the
> tree; nowadays all the ebuilds using autotools should have proper
> autoconf/automake dependency already, and if they don’t they are broken
> anyway. So why leaving them in system? And what about m4? m4 is not part
> of a common Unix system, it’s just an autoconf dependency, why isn’t it
> just an autoconf dependency?
>

IMHO these could be removed from the system set. But likely the packages 
left in there would pull it to the stages any way.

>
> P.S.:
>
> So there are more things that were brought to my attention, like ssh,
> flex, bison, e2fsprogs, and so on. We should probably look into what to
> keep, rather than what to remove.
 >

Well e2fsprogs provides fsck so it's a dep of baselayout. But it 
wouldn't hurt to cleanup the list even if it doesn't get them removed 
from stages. I don't know about other system packages but at least 
baselayout is not really depending on much atm.

Regards,
Petteri