the xorg-server works perfectly fine w/out the xauth program. i would particularly like to kill it off because it pulls in a bunch of libs that otherwise i do not need (libSM/libXmu/etc...). would it be possible to put it behind IUSE=+xauth ?
Unclear to me why xorg-server depends on any of these: >=x11-apps/iceauth-1.0.2 >=x11-apps/rgb-1.0.3 >=x11-apps/xauth-1.0.3 The first two are on my system only because xorg-server depends on them. Removing xauth from xorg-server's DEPEND doesn't actually allow you to get rid of it though... xorg-server unconditionally depends on xinit (unclear if required, likely not) and xinit unconditionally depends on xauth. Marking WONTFIX for now I suppose. If you still think this is a valuable change, reopen and let's see what we can do.
(In reply to Matt Turner from comment #1) > Removing xauth from xorg-server's DEPEND doesn't actually allow you to get > rid of it though... xorg-server unconditionally depends on xinit (unclear if > required, likely not) and xinit unconditionally depends on xauth. I had reason to dig into this whole pile of spaghetti recently so here's some exposition: There's no dependency on xinit by the Xorg server; it (and startx) are just convenience wrappers that start the server and run scripts in /etc/X11/, and it's possible to start up a normal desktop session without ever touching it. XDMs just ignore it and do their own thing. (The whole xinit stack resembles (other distro's) contemporary init ecosystems: it's a trash fire of bad shell scripts calling other scripts that nobody wants to think about or maintain.) Removing *xauth* on the other hand is dangerous: that creates the ~/.Xauthority file (which is unhelpfully binary). X won't start without that present and clients can't connect without it. Usually the file gets created once around OS install time and lives forever, but if someone deletes it after hypothetically depcleaning xauth they're going to have a bad time.
Thank you very much for the analysis! That's very helpful.
