Description of problem: tomcat in EPEL is pulling in redhat-lsb which has a ton of dependencies including X11 libraries, cups etc. On a minimal server, Tomcat alone pulls in like 140 packages. can we cull it down?
This was addressed in RHEL tomcat6 as of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=782400. It looks like it was removed from Fedora, but then added back to satisfy a CentOS dependency. I tried the change from that bug (depending on /lib/lsb/init-functions instead of redhat-lsb), and saw a noticeable drop in the number of packages to be installed: Transaction summary from tomcat epel6: # yum install tomcat-* .... Install 124 Package(s) Upgrade 14 Package(s) Total download size: 191 M After updating lsb dep: # cd /tmp; yum localinstall tomcat-* .... Install 77 Package(s) Upgrade 12 Package(s) Total size: 172 M Total download size: 112 M It still tries to install cups-libs and a few other things that I don't think are necessary. It turns out that this is because tomcat uses the full java package, which has dependencies on all sorts of GUI things that aren't needed by tomcat. Unfortunately I can't update the dependency from java to java-headless because the only headless package available in RHEL6 is java 8 and I'd rather not force users to use java8 for tomcat. Even if I did depend on the java-headless package from java8, it only shaves off about 7 packages and 6M of space because some other dependency (I didn't trace down which) has a dependency on java-1.5.0-gcj, for whatever reason. Anyway, I think removing redhat-lsb is definitely worth it; I'll update the lsb dependency as soon as I can. If you have any feedback on my findings, please let me know.
https://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/tomcat.git/commit/?h=el6&id=5a42e79
tomcat-7.0.72-1.el6 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 6 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for instructions on how to install test updates. You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-a886ace670
tomcat-7.0.72-1.el6 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 6 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.