On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Mike Frysinger <[email protected]> wrote: > it isn't just circular deps. it's also about breaking alternatives and > useless bloat. adding "coreutils" to their depend because they execute `mv`, > or "sed" because they execute `sed`, etc... is absolutely pointless. same > goes for virtual/libc or virtual/os-headers.
Perhaps pointless, but likely harmless as well. I wasn't suggesting that we should systematically add @system deps - only that we shouldn't systematically remove them either unless they cause harm. When I think about the use cases for reduced @system, I think that listing them in RDEPEND probably has more utility than having them in DEPEND. It usually matters more on minimal systems that the packages in the run state are smaller, and the build state often doesn't matter as much (consider something installed into a chroot using crossdev/etc). Coreutils is obviously an extreme example, although even that could be replaced by something like busybox. Then again, unless somebody makes a virtual for it I don't think that trying to put that in an RDEPEND gets us anywhere. Bottom line is that if somebody has a reason for sticking an @system package in (R)DEPEND I don't see the need to treat it as a bug, unless it actually causes harm beyond 30 more bytes in block tail space for something in /usr/portage. Just my two cents... Rich
