I first proposed reducing the size of the system set – the minimal set of packages that form a Gentoo installation – "back in 2008":http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/01/02/proposal-reduce-the-size-of-system-packages-set with the explicit idea of making the dependency tree more accurate by adding the ...
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I'm a FLOSS developer and supported, and a somewhat active blogger. I also wrote Autotools Mythbuster to explain good working practices with autoconf and automake.