Re: [gentoo-user] Removing unnecessary software.

[Alan McKinnon]

On 31/07/2017 18:30, R0b0t1 wrote:
>> The problem i see is that admin. is not free to change the packages
>> set, that is dictated by a profile. -- Like i have pointed out, once i
>> tried to remove SSH (for the example, so that here can be another
>> package, and it was the first (base?) profile), on next system update,
>> it returned and got compiled installed.
>>
> I found https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-963412-start-0.html by
> searching for "remove profile package gentoo."
>
> Admittedly I don't know why there is a requirement for an SSH client
> and server, but I can attest that most distributions ship with them.

A large chunk (possibly even more than 50%) will be servers and VMs that
are headless with no keyboard? If it's a VM or in a data centre
somewhere, you can't even touch it, so there's a hard requirement right
there twice.

With so many installs requiring sshd is why it is there by default, and
it's in @system so that you have to confirm you want it unmerged.
Removing sshd is one of those things that must really NEVER happen by
accident or by typo.

So you have a situation where a sizeable chunk of installs need it and
it really does no harm to have it. Don't run the server if you don't
want it. The whole installed package is less than 6M. The portage tree
by contrast is 733M and consumes 170,000 inodes. And that is a huge
chunk out of any filesystem!

There could be many reasons why portage doesn't have mixins (that's how
you'd best implement user-selectable @systems), and one of them is for
certain - no dev has had that itch bad enough yet to want to scratch it.
And maybe they just don't feel like dealing with the deluge of
complaints and NOTABUGs reported as bugs.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com