Plymouth forces the instalation of gtk+ and its dependencies, even if we don't use gtk+ at all. As Amadeusz Żołnowski said, this is an upstream restriction and that issue may be get rid by hacking the sys-boot/plymouth ebuild. Found a similar bug report in ubuntu (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/509579), they explain that plymouth needs gtk+ only for the X11 renderer, but it could be replaced by XCB (gtk+ and Qt are both based on it), doing plymouth faster and more lightweight. I know that this fix should come from upstream but is possible to do a ebuild hack it will make plymouth more universal, for Qt and gtk+ and another users that doesn't need gtk+ or any of its dependencies. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Do an 'emerge sys-boot/plymouth' on a non-gtk+ environment. Actual Results: It forces the installation of gtk+: # sudo emerge -av plymouth These are the packages that would be merged, in order: Calculating dependencies... done! [ebuild N ] app-shells/dash-0.5.5.1.2 USE="-libedit -static" 0 kB [ebuild N ] dev-libs/atk-1.32.0 USE="nls -doc (-introspection)" 0 kB [ebuild N ] sys-kernel/dracut-008-r1 USE="-debug (-selinux)" DRACUT_MODULES="-btrfs -crypt -dmraid -dmsquash-live -gensplash -iscsi -lvm -mdraid -multipath -nbd -nfs -plymouth -syslog -xen" 0 kB [ebuild N ] x11-libs/gdk-pixbuf-2.22.1 USE="X jpeg jpeg2k tiff -debug -doc (-introspection) -test" 0 kB [ebuild N ] x11-libs/gtk+-2.22.1-r1 USE="jpeg jpeg2k tiff vim-syntax xinerama (-aqua) -cups -debug -doc -examples (-introspection) -test" 0 kB [ebuild N ] sys-boot/plymouth-0.8.3-r1 USE="branding pango -gdm -static-libs" VIDEO_CARDS="intel -nouveau -radeon" 0 kB Expected Results: It should not install dev-libs/atk, x11-libs/gdk-pixbuf or x11-libs/gtk+.
Thank you for scrupulous bug report. :-)
Please have a look at the ebuild in bug #430478 it has the gtk USE flag to let the user remove gtk support at will.
