On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Fabian Groffen <grob...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > From that angle, if you wouldd remove the system set, would you add its > contents to the Portage ebuild? Portage itself doesn't need a compiler > or might not need gawk, but whatever it runs (ebuilds) often need so.
Nope - I'd add them to every ebuild, and only where needed. That's the whole point. > > Adding libc, a compiler, linker, shell, etc. to almost any every ebuild > looks pretty much useless to me. Adding deps for all regular tools an > ebuild uses (bash, sed, awk, cut, wc, ...) seems like error-prone and > pretty much useless to me as well. So, there is the system set which > just is the central place where those packages are recorded. It is only useful for situations where people want to do something unusual. Some would argue that this is the only situation where Gentoo is useful. If I wanted a system just like everybody else's I guess I'd run Ubuntu, if not Windows or OSX. In any case, I do agree that getting there is associated with pain. I just like to think that getting there "someday" would be nice. I know that a systematic effort exists in mathematics to try to reduce all of math to a minimum set of axioms and have everything else be formally derived. I consider that a thing of beauty, even if I don't care to read the two volumes necessary to get to 1+1=2. Rich
