Alistair Bush wrote:
Zac Medico wrote:
I think what most people want is for portage not to pull in a package
that nothing uses. I'm not a dev nor a programmer but I have yet to see
any good reason for installing something that is not being used. It's
not being tested to see if it is stable. It would have to be used
before that would happen. Basically, it is just one more package to
update and taking up hard drive space. It's not doing anything else.
As for slots, if something needs it, portage would pull in the new
slot. That's what portage does. It just seems in this case it is
pulling in a new slot that nothing uses.
Have you considered that they might possibly be hundreds of packages that you
have installed providing functionality that you never use, but are only there
as a fixed dependencies of something that you do.
Hell lets take it even further than that, i'm sure there are thousands of
lines of code in most packages that you will never hit, so why dont we start
"masking" them as well.
I don't recall ever using grep --version, please remove (mask) that code from
grep. We will obviously need someway to unmask those code masks so lets
create a couple of files for portage. Hows....
code.mask and code.unmask with a format of....
package path/to/file line1 line2 line3 line4
Or maybe we could just let users who don't want to install python-3 mask it
_locally_. Once they need it portage is more than capable of telling them
that.
Dale
:-) :-)
Because in my opinion, portage is the first thing in line to keep a
system sane. Installing packages that are not needed means that portage
fails on that. So in your example, portage fails to do its due
diligence and it falls to the users to do it for portage. Yep, sounds
like a good idea.
If a package has something that I don't need, I can generally disable
that with the USE flags. That is why I picked Gentoo as my distro. I
can disable/remove things that I don't need. If Gentoo is going to
start putting a lot of unneeded stuff on my system, I may as well go
back to Mandriva and off the RPM cliff. I left Mandrake to get rid of
unneeded packages. Now Gentoo is doing the same just not nearly as
bad. This would be like a small bump in the huge hill that Mandriva has.
Dale
:-) :-)
