On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 7:20 AM, Anthony G. Basile <bluen...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Sorry Zac, I posted my reply before I read this. This is essentially the > point I was making. However, I think this will be cumbersome. With the > current way we do things, its easy to delete packages from @system by just > doing '-*sys-apps/man-pages' (for example) in a profile's packages file. It > is not so easy to delete from a DEPEND string, so I foresee some tricky if > logic here. >
Appreciating that we're on a slight tangent, why are these packages typically removed? Were they ever truly dependencies? I can't imagine too many packages breaking if man-pages isn't present. If we went the virtual route I would suggest that we end up having a few meta-virtuals. There would be the lazy dependency virtual that pulls in stuff like gcc/libc/posix/etc. There would be a virtual that pulls in useful-to-user stuff like ssh/man-pages/etc. Then there would be a virtual that pulls in both of the other virtuals. Ebuilds would only pull in the dependency virtual. I agree that this would involve a fair bit of work, though I imagine it could be done without any changes to portage insofar as testing things out goes (just create a virtual, stick it in @system in a profile, and test away). -- Rich
