Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs <at> math.uh.edu> writes:
If those packages require an X server then something is rather wrong
with the dependencies, unless by "fully defined dependencies" you mean
"has way more dependencies than actually needed".
You can install those things on a headless server and run them over
the network. No X server is needed on the machine where they're
installed.
They're using soft dependencies, where the admin can decide to treat these as
hard dependencies or ignore them. There's 2 levels of soft dependencies,
Recommends and Suggests, where the first defaults to be treated like a hard
dependency and the second defaults to be ignored.
There's proposals for adding these to RPM too, but that hasn't happened yet.
Once added to RPM, the proponents will also have to convince Fedora that using
them in Fedora is a good idea if they want those features to get actively used.
Kevin Kofler