On 15-08-2012 09:43:37 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > In that case then just ignore that whole section of my post. :) > Personally I consider the existence of @system a bit of a hack - like > the big kernel lock. It works OK, but here and there we run into > issues with it. > > Williamh pointed out that the plan for now is to virtualize > openrc/systemd, which certainly is a solution to that problem. Being > an evolutionary vs revolutionary solution it is probably the better > next step. In fact, if you kept making many steps like that one > before long @system would become mostly a big collection of virtuals > anyway, and at that point its only reason for being would be as an > arbitrary list of packages that ebuild maintainers shouldn't add as > dependencies, at which point you could start stripping it away. > > That isn't unlike what was done to get rid of the big kernel lock - > just remove it one instance at a time...
I see it more as the set of packages I need to have on my system/Prefix, to have Portage and its ebuilds working happily and me being able to do basic stuff. One can debate whether ssh belongs to that set. For a non-Prefix (regular Gentoo?) system it's sort of essential, for a Prefix system, it's quite handy to have an ssh that actually works. Nevertheless, the system set, is a vital part of bootstrapping e.g. a Prefix setup. The whole route leading up to the situation of having the full set installed consists of numerous --nodeps emerges carefully put in an order where one can get away with the errors one receives due to missing stuff. 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. 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. -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo on a different level
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