Hi anonymous -- this is Matthew Miller (openid isn't working for me right now). Sorry for the very late reply here -- Just noticed this. Maybe you'll see it, maybe you won't. First, to clarify, the problem isn't that named packages pull in a bunch of _run time_ dependencies. It's probably 100 binary packages resulting in 430 at runtime. The problem is that in order to _build_ those packages, you need an environment with the almost-4000. Make sense? Harald Hoyer (on the new Fedora Base Design Working Group that came out of this proposal) did some more detailed analysis, with pretty graphs. Take a look at http://www.harald-hoyer.de/2014/01/14/self-hosting-fedora-base/