On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:05 AM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > 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 >
The other point of the system set is to get rid of the chicken and egg problem. For example, virtually every package in the system set ships as a tar, including tar itself. All the compression utilities ship as tars, which need to be installed to build tar (think -z, -j, -J). You need a standard C library to run virtually everything including tar, which you need to extract your standard C sources. The list goes on. -- Doug Goldstein
