[aur-general] Should "base" packages be listed as dependencies?

[beest]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 07:17:17PM -0400, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
> Arch Linux does not support people who don't have systemd installed
> though, and regarding Baptiste's initial example of glibc, if you don't
> have glibc installed then your system is so screwed up it's not even
> funny...
> 
> Given that the official instructions for installing Arch boils down to
> "install the base group into a blank partition and arrange a bootloader
> to boot that base group", I feel it is eminently reasonable to assume
> all valid Arch Linux systems have the base group installed... especially
> because some repo packages *are* built with implicit dependencies
> because of that exact logic. You really can't just go around
> uninstalling parts of base, or rather you can, but then it is up to you
> to know when your unsupported actions are likely to break something.
> (I say this with the full knowledge that I myself uninstall certain
> things I don't feel belong in base at all. I am willing to debug my own
> self-inflicted problems...)
> 
> Though thinking about this, I actually wonder, maybe devtools should
> instruct you (rhet.) to install both base and base-devel into a build
> chroot...

Also xorg-server is generally implicit for anything requiring X
(optionally or otherwise), but that's also not really codified anywhere.
The only guidance anyone is given is that only base-devel is assumed to
be installed for makedepends, but in practice that's hardly the sole
circumstance.

I'm also on the side of explicitly assuming that base is installed (and
having the wiki and PKGBUILD dox reflect as much), but before that there
should possibly be a discussion about what actually belongs in base in
the first place. A few folks are of the mind that a good chunk of the
group is wholly unnecessary and should be culled.