The choice of @system

[ManDay]

Because of dmenu I regularly stumble across binaries which I've never heard of (which are, admitted, quite a few). Occasionally, I take the time to figure out what exactly a certain binary does, where it comes from and why it is installed. And often I find no origin for the latter. Latest example would be "ragel", which, according to the manpage "compiles regular languages into executable state machines". Admitting my ignorance of many system tools, I think I've never seen this used anywere (nor can I imagine where this would be used). I'm not saying that it's useless, in fact, I find it a really cool program, but I just wonder why it's in @system (at least `equery depends` did not return anything).

I think there are quite a few entries in @system which can't be considered mandatory components of a system. But that's exactly what I thought @system was meant to be. Is @system still subject to changes and if, what considerations is it based upon (e.g. what particular reason do we have for ragel)?
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<iamben> I think once you get comfortable w/ gentoo, you'll find most other distros to not be good enough

[John R. Graham]

The dev-util/ragel package is demonstrably not in the system set:

[Hu]

If you try to emerge --ask --verbose --depclean a package in @system, you will be notified that the package is pulled in by @system. A package which is present without dependencies shown by equery could be obsolete, could have been installed by you, or could be an unusual dependency not handled by equery. The first choice seems most likely.

[TomWij]

[Yamakuzure]

You might want to install app-portage/gentoolkit.
This gives you "equery".
And with that you can find out such stuff really quick.
Like this:

[John R. Graham]