If I understand the developper handbook correctly, RDEPEND should only contain runtime dependencies and DEPEND should only contain dependencies needed at compile time. Most of the time, RDEPEND is included in DEPEND, but this is not always the case. For instance, a package containing headers only should only be needed at build time. However, if I check the 'proto' packages of xorg, I see that: - libXcomposite rdepends on compositeproto - libXdamage rdepends on damageproto - libXfixes rdepends on fixesproto - libXfont rdepends on fontsproto - libX11, libxkbfile, libxkbui and libXt rdepend on kbproto - libXp rdepends on printproto - libXrandr rdepends on randrproto - libXtst rdepends on recordproto - libXrender rdepends on renderproto - libXv and libXvMC rdepend on videoproto - libXext and libmpeg2 (!) rdepend on xextproto - and many other packages rdepend on xproto On the same subject, but not related to xorg, hal rdepends on linux-headers. On the other hand, a lot of packages rdepend on pkgconfig and that's clearly an error (grisbi, libburn, libisofs, cairo, glib-perl, gtk2-perl, gst-plugins-ffmpeg, shrip and libgksu amongs others). Finaly iso-codes doesn't have any RDEPEND clause. In that case, it seems that RDEPEND = DEPEND whereas RDEPEND should be empty. Reproducible: Always
Please don't file monster bugs about totally unrelated packages. This one is for x11-libs/ *only*. Anything else not maintained by x11 -> a *new* bug.
In a Gentoo system, where you compile things against libraries and headers, we consider any headers directly #include'd by the X libraries to be their runtime dependencies. We make this interpretation because of the sheer scale of trying to do anything else. The alternative would be to make every single package that used X add a number of additional *proto packages to its DEPEND list. One Gentoo developer wanted to make this same change, but once he realized the scope of it, he decided it wasn't worth the effort. If you're on an embedded system where this is critical, you could use a feature like INSTALL_MASK or run a script to clean out the usual places like /usr/include, /usr/share/man, etc.
