Brian Harring wrote:

>> And no, I don't think that Gentoo should fully support reduced-@system
>> builds, but there is no harm in making them more of a viable option.
> 
> Personally... I think gentoo should aim for it actually.  Question is
> how close we can get to it w/out overly burdening developers.
> 
I always thought of @system as providing a POSIX-compatible userland,
exactly so that deps wouldn't need to be listed. eg every POSIX compatible
system has to have find, sed etc[1] and of course ed which is missing,
annoyingly enough for scripting.

With regard to having a slimmed-down @system it might appear to make sense
to look at moving to only allowing POSIX options, testing perhaps with
sys-apps/minised[2] (assuming we'd have a virtual in @system) which I
haven't tried. AIUI however there's far too many sed GNUisms to go down
that road.

Even on FreeBSD they're still using gsed; the fact that people will not stop
using GNU-style regexes-- and that they need it for their own base system--
is only driving them to work on including the same extensions in their own
software.[3]

Given that we're not about to clear the GNUisms from the tree, it's been "a
system package since at least 2004" with dependencies on versions "as high
as 4.0.5, which went stable in 2003" I'd concur that the existing ebuild/
eclass dependencies should be trimmed as and when, if it can't be
automated.

Hopefully at some point there'll be another implementation with the same or
similar capabilities, which might even make it into POSIX. Until then it
would appear Gentoo needs gsed just like it needs bash, afaict. An embedded
system might well have a different profile; presumably applications would
not be built on the target tho.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/contents.html
[2] http://www.exactcode.de/oss/minised/
[3] See point 3 at:
http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Replacing-our-regex-implementation-td4380832.html
-- 
#friendly-coders -- We're friendly but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)



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