With a new system, trying to emerge syslog-ng, I notice, that this would install 12 dependent packages. I ONLY want a system logger {only one spaghetto so to say}. Not the whole plate of spaghetti. Why do I need half the plate full of docbook, an unzipper and another quarter of a plate gtk stuff? I have the use flag "-doc" and even tried "-xml", "-docbook", but this didn't help to get it smaller. In my opinion, one should try to minimise unnecessary dependencies of elementary functionality of a system. I remember, it was described as the spirit of the Gentoo distribution to be efficient. I feel, that here, without necessity, one introduces too much entropy {the amount of information to describe a system} and unnecessary entropy is the opposite of efficiency. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 0. setting up a new system with stage3-i686-20101207.tar.bz2 1. emerge --sync 2. emerge portage 3. emerge --pretend syslog-ng Actual Results: emerge --pretend syslog-ng These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N ] dev-libs/eventlog-0.2.12 USE="-static-libs" [ebuild N ] dev-util/pkgconfig-0.25-r2 USE="hardened" [ebuild N ] app-text/build-docbook-catalog-1.4 [ebuild N ] app-arch/unzip-6.0-r1 USE="bzip2 unicode" [ebuild N ] app-text/sgml-common-0.6.3-r5 [ebuild N ] dev-libs/libgpg-error-1.7 USE="nls -common-lisp" [ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets-1.75.2 [ebuild N ] dev-libs/libgcrypt-1.4.6 [ebuild N ] dev-libs/libxslt-1.1.26 USE="crypt python -debug" [ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.3-r1 [ebuild N ] dev-util/gtk-doc-am-1.15 [ebuild N ] dev-libs/glib-2.24.1-r1 USE="-debug -doc -fam (-selinux) -xattr" [ebuild N ] app-admin/syslog-ng-3.1.2 USE="hardened ipv6 pcre ssl tcpd -caps (-selinux) -spoof-source -sql -static" Expected Results: The dependencies on eventlog, and pkgconfig are ok {may be unzip also}. If I have USE flags, which tell, that I'm interested in encryption functionalities, something around tls, ssl, gnupg were ok.
USE flags control optional dependencies and not everything are optional. Far as I can see most of those are buildtime -only dependencies you can clean off from your system after syslog-ng installation: emerge --depclean
