Description:

Hi. I have a question that really bothers me lately. When did arch packages start to depend on packages from base?
It makes it somewhat of a pain to swap out pieces of the system for other things:

sh-4.2# pacman -Rs systemd
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: device-mapper: requires systemd
:: libusb: requires systemd
:: lvm2: requires systemd
:: mkinitcpio: requires systemd
:: netctl: requires systemd
:: pcmciautils: requires systemd
:: systemd-sysvcompat: requires systemd

The issue is mostly addressed by replacement packages providing the same thing, but as systemd provides a lot of things in one package, we have a nasty situation where, say, eudev provides udev, systemd, libsystemd and and systemd-tools. Which feels like a really dirty hack that shouldn't be there. And it invites conflicting packages in AUR. But if eudev doesn't provide all those things, installing it becomes inconvenient.
tl;dr I think that we shouldn't depend on base and/or base-devel like we've never did before AFAIR.

And I know that the systemd topic is very hot right now, and probably will be for some time in the future. But my gripe is not with systemd itself in this case, so please treat it as just an example I've run into.
I think that depending on base makes arch less flexible, that's all.