On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 6:08 PM, Alan McKinnon <[email protected]> wrote: > > But let's consider this: what level of chaos would arise if @system were > dropped? Surely the problem of tracking all deps would get so out of > hand so quickly, that @system or something equivalent would immediately > be reinstated? >
I don't think so. Why don't other distros have this problem with their source packages? They actually have more packages to deal with since they don't have use flags and often split what is one Gentoo package into many packages. You can still have virtuals when it makes sense to have them. Automation might be an option in some cases as well. If a package uses gcc and python, there is no reason that this couldn't be two virtuals in addition to whatever specific libraries it requires. You could also have virtuals for posix and such. We would also separate virtuals intended for user convenience (give me a useful system, maybe including screen and ssh and such) from virtuals intended for dependencies (you don't need screen and ssh to build everything on the system). There is no reason that the default install has to start with only the core dependencies, or with an empty world set. -- Rich
