On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:51 AM, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > It is what it is. FWIW -- I don't think they are "expected", base is a > guideline and other packages should not be making assumptions (and usually > don't). > > I think it could reasonably be expected that one has things like > bash/sed/tar installed, but anything likely to be manually removed from > base I expect to be listed in package dependencies. Actually, the wiki says that the base group is always assumed to be installed [1] and many packages will not explicitly depend on anything that is in the base group even though it does depend on it in reality. Some bug reports about package dependencies are closed because the dependency is in the base group [2]. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34024 Best regards, Vitor Sakaguti