This naturally causes problems for anybody who removes gnome-core in order to update to gnome 2. When one attempts to install with --nodeps, compilation fails when attempting to create the gnome-panel (1.4) applet. Assigned to spider since it's gnome2-related, this may be the wrong thing to have done.
gaim-0.59-r2 fixes this with a dependency on gnome-panel-1.4.1