On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Anthony G. Basile <bluen...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > I'm not sure we can get rid of python2 and have only python3, but if that's > possible, absolutely punt it! The bloat I'm talking about includes size, > but more importantly, I'm concerned about cpu time. When building on a minor > arch where your CPU speed is 600 MHz and you only have 256MB of ram (and > lots of slow swap to help for monsters like gcc-4.8), you feel the bloat in > days of waiting.
The other issue is the parallel build issue. @system and its deps can't be built in parallel. That means a penalty for every update to any of those packages for life. Any kind of actual end-user application that goes into @system greatly compounds this problem. Applications tend to have lots of dependencies. There isn't much question that stuff like rsync and nano (via the editor virtual) should be in the stage3 just so that we're not ripping our hair out during installation. However, they really don't need to be part of the system set. How many packages really need to depend on an editor (and I'm talking linking and other technical issues that affect builds - not practical use)? Of course, people probably don't want to unmerge the last text editor or rsync from their system which is why it doesn't hurt to have some kind of mix-in that defines minimally-useful stuff like this all the same, but which separates it from the practice of not declaring dependencies. I'm sure all of us have our favorite utilities that we put on every Gentoo install we do (tmux/screen, atop, vim, etc). The problem is that once you go down that road we end up in endless debates. If we instead ask questions like "what are all the packages which >30% of the tree would otherwise have to depend on if not in @system?" or "what is the minimum set of packages that need to be preinstalled to build anything else in the tree?" we have unambiguous questions that have unambiguous answers. -- Rich
