The collectd-5.5.1-r2 ebuild introduced a dependency on sys-fs/xfsprogs: DEPEND="${COMMON_DEPEND} collectd_plugins_cgroups? ( sys-fs/xfsprogs ) collectd_plugins_df? ( sys-fs/xfsprogs ) [...] This is not needed. The only use of xfs headers is in src/utils_mount.c and it is optional and guarded by HAVE_XFS_XQM_H ifdefs. If you don't already have XFS in use you won't need /can't have meaningful metrics reporting for it anyway. I removed both DEPENDs and got a clean compile, install and the server is running and collecting metrics for df and cgroups. Am I missing something? I could not locate an issue with reasoning why the depend got added?
It is only a build dependency. Yes, collectd will build without xfsprogs. However it will pick up headers from xfsprogs when available. To allow reproducible builds I explicitly added this dependency (this was detected when rebuilding collectd failed after xfsprogs was updated to v4.5.0). Until upstream allows us to disable XFS usage I prefer having reproducible builds. Feel free to submit patches to upstream. If this causing any problems or you have other arguments to drop this dependency please share. But please remember, this is just a build dependency.
Thanks for your detailed answer. I agree that bug fixing is more important than convenience. It's just really surprising that an unwanted package is pulled in and lead me to assume a bug there. I couldn't stop emerge @world from selecting the (build dependency) package and solved it by masking sys-fs/xfsprogs.
This spells automagic dependency. This is 'black magic' in gentoo and this warrants being dealt with further. The first step is to formerly prompt upstream with this request. Beyond that, it appears that the dep is an optional one and can be dealt with inhouse gentoo style accordingly.
