Re: [gentoo-dev] DEPENDing on system components

[Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 09:25:46PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Can someone enlighten me: why DEPEND/RDEPEND on packages which are *always* 
> present on the system, and are even pre-built in build snapshots? For example 
> some ebuilds explicitly depend on virtual/glibc, what's the point in that? 
> Many ebuilds use things like flex bison etc. to compile. When creating 
> non-critical, non-system ebuilds which certainly won't be built before glibc 
> or the kernel - should I keep track of these things?

This is necessary so that you can build a complete system from scratch in the
right order, i.e:

# export ROOT=/mnt/gentoo
# emerge system

It's just safer to have some of these basic dependencies (like virtual/glibc)
since they help "emerge system" with the build ordering.  Also, some of these
more basic dependencies *may not* be standard for embedded Gentoo Linux systems.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.