On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Alan McKinnon <[email protected]> wrote: > Correct. With most Linux package managers, everything is a package and > everything has strict dependencies. You install the bits you want and > the PM installs the bits it needs. > > Gentoo is one of the very few PMs that even has a concept of @system at all >
To be honest, I think this is one of its larger deficiencies, and it causes many problems. IMHO, the only reason we have @system is that devs create dependencies entirely by hand and most don't want to actually document what they are. Of course, the need to build packages give Gentoo packages a large number of build-time dependencies, but any distro that allows packages to be built from source has to deal with this as well. Sure, to bootstrap anything you need to start out with something, but that doesn't mean that you can't still track what the actual dependency relationships are, and in any case our system set is larger than the set of packages necessary to bootstrap the rest of the distro. Of course, it is hard to say exactly what is and isn't necessary for bootstrapping since we don't capture our dependencies. -- Rich
