Most people won't see this because both less and man are included in the `emerge system` but techinically the man package depends on less. I found this because I was playing with building a the gcc-3.1 system and wanted to check the gcc-3.1 man pages to see how I wanted to configure my CFLAGS before I ran `emerge system`.
good call
Technically that is why we have a "system profile", to not have all these hundreds of small deps. Anyhow, you can use "more" instead of less ... should we now add both to RDEPEND ?
I think that it is important for each package to correctly DEPEND on what it needs. If that information is correct you can do intersting things like ask "If I upgrade this package what other packages could possibly be affected?" I see your point that you have to draw the line somewhere on how explicit the DEPENDs are. In the set of packages that is not part of the "system" set I think it is reasonable for them to not explicitly DEPEND on packages that are in the "system" set. For the set of packages that are in the "system" set I think they should explicitly DEPEND on packages they need, including other packages within the "system" set. I was not a Gentoo user or dev when the system profile was created. I'm under the impression that system is the base set of packages need for a Gentoo system, other than a few user controled specifics like the kernel or syslog package.
In general a "emerge system" (maybe "emerge -u system") should bring you up to speed with the system profile.
yes it does, At the time I was installing a new system using the default-1.0-gcc3 profile and I wanted to access the gcc man pages before I ran `emerge system`. I ran `emerge man` with the expectation that once it completed I could do `man gcc` (because the bootstrap.sh installs gcc) but when I tried `man gcc` it gave an error about the less pager not being found.
In the latest 1.4 stages, less are present, so this should be fixed.
