'repoquery --whatprovides xorg-x11-base' returns no matches in rawhide, and I
don't have a package by that name in CVS for any release of the OS.  Where are
you getting the name 'xorg-x11-base' from?

I must have made a silly assumption when comparing against RHEL-4 where X is
provided by xorg-x11.

Original report should be read as:

"Missing requirement on xorg-x11-server-Xorg

xorg-x11-xdm misses a requirement on xorg-x11-server-Xorg.

As a result yum groupinstall "KDE (...)" fails to install X as a dependency."

Sorry for the confusion.

That's intentional though.  xdm doesn't need an X server installed in order to
work; it just needs an X server to talk to.  Firefox doesn't require apache.

My understanding is this is the sort of thing comps files are for, rather than
RPM dependencies.

Well, then you please tell me which dependency is missing.

If I yum groupinstall KDE *something* should pull in an X server. This doesn't
happen though.

(Maybe the dependency should be on kdebase?)

(In reply to comment #4)
> Well, then you please tell me which dependency is missing.
> 
> If I yum groupinstall KDE *something* should pull in an X server. This doesn't
> happen though.
> 
> (Maybe the dependency should be on kdebase?)
> 

no it shouldn't maybe you want to run kde through vnc, maybe to ssh X
forwarding, maybe you only want it to build packages (as on a build server)

I think this should be closed as not a bug.