well, both tehese packages -can - build without either of the other, ofc, esound requires audiofile, but gnome can build without both, but will then break for things like nautilus media view, sound support (galeon gnomeicu and others depend on this fex. ) and will generally be problematic if it isn't -ON- per default To have this supported we'd have to have audiofile USE flag (yes, a user might want audiofile separated from esound, they do different thing after all) and esd, and both should be -ON- by default or we will ship a broken version of Gnome with our default configuration. So, eitehr we leave it as is for hard dependencies, or we enable those as USE flags (per requests, there are bugs about it and I've been contacted on IRC about solving it). if they are made as USE flags we need them "on-per-default"
libgnome builds without a problem without esound and audiofile. Other ebuilds (libgnomeui gnome-panel) broke, but this maybe due to my system not being clean. If i remember correctly i built both libgnome and libgnomeui on my server without esd and audiofile without a problem, but i removed it later on so i can't check. On a clean install it shouldn't be problematic, the libgnomeui configure.in mentions esound and audiofile are optional dependencies. Nautilus has its own esound dependency so it won't get in trouble, other apps named i didn't check. As far as gnome-libs goes, i wouldn't tamper with it now. Maybe it can be disabled, but since gnome1 is slowly abandoned the configurability wouldn't justify the work that needs to be done to get it right imho.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6920 ***
