Tim:
But disregarding minimalism, there's still plenty of situations where a rather extensive installation won't need various things considered to be "required", but actually aren't.
Tom Horsley:
For grins, try to remove "cdrecord" on a fedora system. If I have no CDRW drive, you'd think I could live without it, but the dependencies say it also has to remove lots of bits of gnome and even decides it has to remove compiz (I was trying to get rid of excess baggage in a Xen guest OS when I discovered this one).
I've not tried that one, but yes, I've tried to remove a few things that had some strange cascade effects. Please, lets have the OS separate fro user interfaces and from applications and from other things...
Bet you never expected CD recording software was required to make your windows wiggle :-).
;-)