I've been running version 7.2.0 of BOINC on my Gentoo Linux stable i5 machine and recently decided to upgrade to 7.4.42. It pulls in 17 other packages that the earlier version didn't need, including Ruby, yaml and webkit. Why does a number-cruncher need all these other things? It's taking ages to compile them all.

Upgrade from where?
If with the BOINC installer package from Berkeley, these libraries are the only prerequisites that BOINC and BOINC Manager were built with, which may be needed.

If from repositories, well, that's up to the person who maintains the repositories for your Linux distro.

If you're building BOINC yourself, the aforementioned prerequisites are the only ones needed.

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The extra packages are perhaps specified for a BOINC server build. You should ask the distro maintainer if there are separate packages for 'client only' or 'client + manager' - and if not, why not.

BOINC Manager was updated in v7.3 to use wxWidgets 3.0. Since you have webkit in that list it seems you are building wx too and presumably it's dependencies too.

BOINC itself doesn't depend on all that many libraries/programs but when you count dependencies of BOINC's dependencies and their dependencies and so on, yes, you do end up with a long list of packages to build.

Maybe there is a reason why distros with binary packages are more popular...


BTW. Ask the package maintainer to update BOINC to version 7.6.23 or newer.