Please remove dhcpd and telnetd from the base system (/etc/make.profile/packages). They are not needed on most systems and certainly are never required for the operation of the base system. It's OK that they are available (though telnetd should be strongly deprecated because it is highly insecure), but please don't force them on all users. Yes, I know that I can just tweak /etc/make.profile/packages myself. But either it gets overwritten on every "emerge sync" or I have to keep it up to date manually.
is reiserfsprogs really necessary for the base system? there are those who run systems without reiserfs at all, afaik.
reiserfsprogs is at least needed during installation for those that do use reiserfs. But it might be a good idea to create an own package list for the installer and move those packages from the base system to the installer. Dhcpd and telnetd are never used by the installer, so they should neither show up in the base system nor in the installer.
half of this is a dup of bug 4650 (the telnetd part) perhaps a new bug should be opened entitled 'Gentoo Core needs to be cut of fat' ?
Telnetd also installs the telnet application, which I believe most sysadmins use regularly. I certainly do, even though I haven't run the telnet daemon in years. I would only mildly object to telnet not being in the base system, since "emerge -s telnet" will return net-misc/netkit-telnetd (confusing the heck out of people who don't know that the netkit-telnetd package also contains the telnet client, although the Description reads: "Standard Linux telnet client"). Also "dhcpd" is _not_ in the default system (or, in fact, even a package, for that matter). In the default system profile you will find "dhcpcd", which is the dhcp client daemon. I think this package makes sense for a lot of users.
We're not going to remove dhcpcd from the base system. I'm marking this bug a duplicate of 4650. It would be fine with me if somebody opened a new "what packages really need to be *'d in the default packages file?" and marked 4650 as depending on it. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4650 ***
