XFCE depends on GNOME, why?

[Gordon Messmer]

Globe Trotter wrote:
> 
> I thought I provided a very specific list of dependencies as an
> example.

It might be helpful if someone showed you how dependencies are 
generated, because I don't think you understand.  It's not accidental on 
the part of the package maintainer.

$ rpm -q --requires firefox | awk '!/rpmlib/ {print $1}' | \
   while read req ; do rpm -q --whatprovides "$req" ; done | sort | uniq

... or leave off all of the processing, "rpm -q --requires firefox"

In that list, you'll see gnome-vfs2.  When the firefox package was 
built, rpm did something very much like:

$ rpm -ql firefox | \
   while read file ; do test -f $file -a -x $file && ldd $file ; done \
   | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq

You'll see libgnomevfs-2.so.0 in the list.  So, while you might be able 
to remove the gnome desktop and applications and still have firefox, you 
cannot remove "gnome-vfs2", which you tried to do when you did "yum 
erase gnome*"

Does it make sense now?

> Of course, but sometimes, dependencies are included in error, as in
> the R example.

R requires cairo.  Since I'm not sure what release you saw this on, I 
don't know if cairo depended on some gnome package or if something else 
was going on.