XFCE depends on GNOME, why?

[Globe Trotter]

> >
> > I have tried this a number of times and over time,
> gnome elements still get pulled in.
>
> Be specific and show the output of the command I have
> given. Xfce does have "GNOME" elements in it
> depending on what you consider part of GNOME.

Hi,

All I was trying to say was that over time, gnome elements got pulled in, despite trying things like this or similar. I started with the XFCE Fedora 8 Live CD and then stripped it of gnome-related RPMS and over time, and upgrades, I still have all those gnome\* rpms which have nothing to do with gnome.

>
> > I think part of the problem may be that when a
> developer (who perhaps uses Gnome) builds rpms, he often
> puts in some unnecessary dependency.
>
> Can't happen this way. Every package is build under a
> clean chroot. GNOME developers don't build Xfce anyway.

I am not talking about Gnome developers, rather developers of packages, who seem to include some gnome dependency sometimes. As an example, the statistical package R used to depend on gnome. Now, I have been very involved with R in the past, starting from 0.1 and I know for a fact that it predated gnome and has nothing to do with gnome. More importantly, now, it suddenly does not again depend on anything to do with gnome. It all depends on what it is told to depend on when the rpm is built, from my simplified understanding. Sometimes this is unnecessary, as in the case of R, but still included in error. I don't see this problem completely going away.


> To see this, note that
> >
> > yum erase gnome\*
> >
> > (see below for my installation)
> > will delete things like firefox which should have
> nothing to do with gnome but is mistakenly dependent on
> these gnome\
>
> Firefox has such dependencies. Upstream either include
> local copies or statically builds them and it is less
> exposed that way but it is still there.

I use firefox from the days of phoenix, and even contributed to the original code. I did not have gnome  in those days. I wonder if it really requires gnome, either directly or indirectly.  Similarly for xfce4-xfapplet-plugin, etc.

Trotter