Just to report I've been able to remove app-arch/xz-utils from my own workstation, with 2412 packages installed and running kde. I'm going to roll it out to my other gentoo systems which have a lot less stuff on them so am confident will be fine. It's not completely trivial but not as difficult as I imagined it to be, certainly something an advance Gentoo user could do if they wanted, with instructions. It does involve a relatively small hack and functionality previously provided by xz-utils is replaced by app-arch/p7zip.
I haven't had to give up distfile checksum verifications, everything builds, boots and is working fine, I don't miss it at all. There is some small (at least small for me) functionality you'll lose, but nothing I'll miss. I also had to uninstall 2 desktop packages which I can live without, in order to get there, but I believe even they can be later coaxed into working with some persuasion. I would imagine the majority of Gentoo installations would not miss it unless they do a lot of work daily directly using xz-utils and they particularly like all the different permutations of how it can be run and inserted here and there. Also, it goes without saying if you run any sort of application that absolutely refuses to run without liblzma.so being present and the requirement cannot be compiled out, or you have scripts which rely on liblzma.so provided functionality inside the language they use, then of course this cannot be done. If anyone wants to know the details of how to do it no problem just ask. I won't post if no one asks, to not get on people's nerves here with and this mail getting longer and longer, especially when most here are not interested in doing this and don't believe it is necessary. For all the overworked Gentoo developers I'd like to compliment you for once rather than irritating you; it's only realistically possible to do because of the the powerful distribution you have created, particularly the great choices you've made along the way, that allows the Linux user to do advanced stuff that would just not be realistically achievable to users on the vast majority of other distros. Eddie
