@world vs @system

[Dr Croubie]

I'm sure this has been asked before but I can't find anything (trying to search on oft-used words such as 'world' and 'system' is a recipe for thousands of irrelephant results).


What (or who) controls what goes in the '@system' list?
(and more to the point, where is it?)


The long story is, I'm updating for the first time in 2 years.
So I've done the basics: gcc, glibc, libtools, portage etc.
Next step is just a simple 'emerge -eva system' to capture the rest and rebuild the basic toolchains, BEFORE I then go on to tackling xorg/kde/and all those higher-level packages.


But (and I've noticed this before), 'emerge -eva system' seems to want to do (almost) every package that's installed.


I've always thought (and opined) that 'system' should be just that: only be the absolute bare necessities to get a working system.
Things like gcc, glibc, portage, sysvinit, openrc, gentoo-sources, anything in sys-*/*, dev-libs/, dev-python, app-portage/* and all those.

But it's pulling in kde-*/*, dev-qt/*.
Maybe I'm a bit old-school, but KDE is a program that runs on top of a system. KDE is not the system.
'system' is and should be init 3 and below.

Even without arguing about KDE, how about the fact that it's pulling in texlive and libre-freaking-office?
They most certainly are not system, they are the furthest from it.
They are the highest of the high-level programs that run on top of everything else.


In short, a) who or what decides what is 'system', and b) where is it and can I manually edit it?

[tryn]

In your emerge command you need to leave out the " e " in your -eva . The " e " will do an empty tree which is why you are getting all of those items listed.

[Dr Croubie]

well yes, I know I'm doing --emptytree
I want to rebuild the entire thing.
1 First I want to rebuild basic tools like gcc/portage, that's done.
2 Next I want to rebuild the rest of the basic system, sys-*/* and dev-python/* packages and whatnot
3 Only once that is complete do I want to even think about libreoffice and texmaker and all that higher-level stuff.

The problem is that I'm trying to do step 2 but it's forcing me to do steps 2 and 3 together

My question is why '--emptytree system' is containing packages like libreoffice that should only be in 'world' and should not appear in 'system'

(and fwiw, 'emerge -uDNva system' does basically the same thing, also pulls in libreoffice when it shouldn't)

[Hu]

Some package in system may have an optional dependency, which is enabled on your system, that causes it to require a package that you would not normally consider to be part of @system. USE=doc is most infamous for this, but there may be others. USE=qt5 on cmake can cause it to pull in plenty of Qt packages, and cmake itself might have been pulled in if something in @system uses a CMake-based build.

Add --tree to the command and examine the results, or post them here. The nesting should make it clearer why the surprising packages are pulled in.

[Ant P.]

What (or who) controls what goes in the '@system' list?
(and more to the point, where is it?)

Code: Select all

cat $(portageq get_repo_path / gentoo)/profiles/{base,default/linux}/packages