Maybe I was miss understood here. I know that there are tons of ways to have gentoo *running* in a box without it having network connection. The thing is that makes like 0.01% of the total installs. It's not a default install, it isn't on any gentoo manual I know of (besides the chroot one, but I really don't consider that an installation), and most importantly, AFAIK, it's not something any John Doe would do. Offline installations and "runtimes" are for geeks that use linux for a long time and know how the system work and have the knowledge to build a stage4 or chroot and move it to another box. It's not something technically difficult for us "geeks", but would take ages for some non-geek to do it.
Hell, a friend of mine normally calls me when he needs to do something to his box other that "pacman <something>" (yeah, he's on arch) and he's using linux for some time now.
The bottom line here is, does @system have to have virtual/network-provider?
- Yes -> Make it RDEPEND;
- No -> don't care and just set some use flags.
The question above is more a political one than technical. Everyone here knows that a system doesn't have to have networking support for it to boot, we can't even guarantee that networking support is in the kernel (at least I don't see it using kernel-*.eclass), but is it a safe default meaning that 99% or more of the people will use or *need* it? <--- political