begin  quote
On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 03:20:11 +0200
Alex Efros <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:



> without prob, but all software with optional XFree support will be
> compiled without it.

 
> Ohh, sorry!!! I've just rechecked /etc/make.profile/packages and
> noticed
> what there is no 'star' at line '>=x11-base/xfree-4.1.0-r12', so it
> shouldn't be installed by `emerge system` at all, right?

Well, python has "tcltk" as a USE flag, and tcltk is "tk", means "X"
(its an X toolkit after all)  so depending on your settings you may get 
X from "emerge system" 


> 
> 
> Hmm. I think it's simple enough to realize 'readlink' as bash-function
> using 'ls -l'... but this isn't really important.

Well, that is simple, but doesn't work for buildscripts , so its simpler
to just provide it ;)
  
> > > 7) bc
> > Common unix standard tool, used by a lot of buildscripts. 
> 
> I don't know such buildscripts... Really:

Well, we cheat. if something is mentioned in system it doesn't have to
be a total DEPEND.  okay, its bad form , but it eases calculation in a
few cases.  But if you find things that break without bc, tell us and we
can fix the dep's. 



> 
> I've now checked /etc/make.profile/packages again, and all my
> questions
> about it content disappear: bc, dhcpd, debianutils, etc. is mostly
> small
> harmless things. Only question left is my initial question: do you
> really think what PAM support is 100% required for anyone and should
> be in 'system'? Is it safe to just unmerge pam and pam-login (I've
> USE="-pam")?  ... From my point of view, PAM is very good idea with
> very bad realization -
> there a number of bugs and security holes found from time to time in
> PAM,
> so it's safer to not use PAM if you don't need some PAM's features.
> 


This is up for argument, I think pam-login is pulled in because shadow's
login implementation had a -bad- case of login-fails-three-times and get
root access.   Frankly i haven't given it much thought myself, but Its a
nice goal to see if you can cut out pam completely and not have things
breaking. (please document it! ;)


As seen, a lot of things are done because it eases support burden and
doesn't break things.  I'm pretty sure you can streamline a profile far
more than this.


//Spider



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