Carlos Silva posted on Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:51:01 +0000 as excerpted:

> gentoo *running* in a box without it having network connection
> [is AFAIK] not something any John Doe would do. Offline
> installations and "runtimes" are for geeks that use linux for a long
> time and know how the system work and have the knowledge to build a
> stage4 or chroot and move it to another box. It's not something
> technically difficult for us "geeks", but would take ages for some
> non-geek to do it.

That sounds an awful lot like how most distro users out there would 
characterize gentoo in general...

The point being, as said many times before, gentoo isn't a hand-holding 
distro.  We provide the tools and often the documentation, but at some 
point it's up to the user, and gentoo is one of the few distros that 
seems to both recognize and respect that line, making it reasonably easy 
for a user to do whatever they want, including breaking something and 
keeping the pieces if that's the ultimate end result of what they want...

FWIW, that's one of the reasons a lot of us ARE gentooers. =:^)

> The bottom line here is, does @system have to have
> virtual/network-provider?
> - Yes -> Make it RDEPEND;
> - No -> don't care and just set some use flags.
> 
> The question above is more a political one than technical.

Agreed.

FWIW, either a stdnet/oldnet default-use in openrc, or a virtual/net in 
@system, sounds appropriate to me.  I do believe that if oldnet is split 
out, however, it only makes sense to split out newnet as well.   
Otherwise, people are likely to favor newnet in ordered to avoid another 
package, when the gentoo default has always been oldnet, and this 
proposal isn't about changing that.

Meanwhile, FTR, I run both USE=-* and an entirely negated @system (no 
packages in @system at all, as I've /etc/portage/profile/packages-ed them 
away!), but AM running oldnet here.  So whatever the solution ends up 
being, I almost certainly have some config changes to deal with coming 
up.  But that's precisely why I'm subscribed here, to get a heads-up on 
this sort of thing coming down the pike before I crash into it and GAME 
OVER!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman