3 ms·
USE flags. You can build packages with specific features enabled or disabled, which can further reduce your dependency tree.
by CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
USE flags. You can build packages with specific features enabled or disabled, which can further reduce your dependency tree.
- kennysoona 2y agoFor building specific packages with particular flags, wouldn't slackbuilds have been sufficient?
- stakhanov 2y agoReducing the dependency tree gets a bit more complicated once you consider that now you have to satisfy not only runtime dependencies for all packages but also build-time dependencies. There may be ways of cleaning that up after a build, but next time you want to emerge a new package you'll just end up having to re-build the build-time dependencies, so in practice you'll just end up leaving them there. There is an ability to emerge packages to a separate part of the filesystem tree (ROOT="/my/chroot" emerge bla), so that you have one build-time system act as a kind of incubator for a runtime system that gets to be minimal. But you'll end up encountering problems that most other Gentoo users wouldn't encounter, having to do with the separation between build-time dependencies and runtime dependencies not being correctly made in the recipes. Personally, I had been relying on this feature for roughly the last 10 years, but there has been steady deterioration there over the years and I eventually gave up late last year.
- cb321 2y agoThis is a good point. I've been using Gentoo since early 2004 (the dreaded Pentium IV era, Lol). Lately, I run into this with dev-lang/tcl only being need to build dev-db/sqlite. I actually think it's pretty weird that software intended to be as widely used as sqlite with as much of a free base of supporting devs doesn't just do the extra effort to use a Makefile.