Gentoolkit and portage-utils provides tools necessary for proper maintenance of a Gentoo system, like dispatch-conf and revdep-rebuild among others, yet these aren't included in the base install. This confuses users (me!), and it feels a bit silly having to emerge separate packages to complete an install or perform post-install maintainance. I don't realy care how gentoolkit and portage-utils ends up in the stages, but to get a discussion going I'm suggesting a USE=minimal for sys-apps/portage making it depend on them both if turned off, and having this be the default. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge -u x11-base/xorg-server → WARN: postinst ... 'no X for YOU, until qlist -I -C x11-drivers/ | xargs emerge -1' 2. emerge -u app-text/poppler → WARN: postinst ... "you're advised to run revdep-rebuild" 3. emerge -u dev-python/sip → WARN: postinst ... blah, blah, "equery d dev-python/sip dev-python/PyQt4" 4. emerge -u @world → IMPORTANT: XX config files in /etc need updating Actual Results: 1. qlist: command not found 2. revdep-rebuild: command not found 3. equery: command not found 4. dispatch-conf: command not found Expected Results: Gentoolkit and portage-utils should already be installed and all these tools available.
There are many useful tools that are not provided on a stage3 - we don't provide a logger or a cron daemon. @release: Feel free to reopen if you disagree with RESOLVED WONTFIX
Neither are portage/Gentoo tools, nor necessary! While useful, I don't see how they compare. Without gentoolkit/portage-utils you can't fix broken packages or merge config file updates the officially documented way; without a cron daemon, you simply don't have a cron daemon. If we needed a cron daemon to complete portage operations, I'd have suggested we provide a cron daemon too.
