xbmc has several questionable 'forced' dependancies. One is x11-apps/mesa-progs that supply only valexia ~ # equery f mesa-progs * Searching for mesa-progs ... * Contents of x11-apps/mesa-progs-7.4.1: /usr /usr/bin /usr/bin/glxgears /usr/bin/glxinfo Unless they do something really silly like grepping for supported extension via glxinfo or using glxgears to display some gears I don't see the need of this. Even if they do use glxinfo to assess the supplied extensions, there should be a patch going upstream to 'fix' this. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
please try reading the changelog and/or source code next time 05 Mar 2009; Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> xbmc-9999.ebuild: Add mesa-progs to the depend list #261226 by Michalis Adamidis. if you have a problem with this behavior, feel free to complain upstream and/or send them a fix yourself. i dont have a problem with this behavior.
I always liked that gentoo could be a mean and lean distro if you tuned it to be such. I was trying to get it installed into my dedicated mediabox which is very limited in its resources and flashdisk space. Having 'useless' programs installed to waste resources just to run 'glxgears' is silly! I'll see what I can do to resolve it upstream properly then.