From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510 Description of problem: emacs requires X to install, despite references in its package description (viewable with rpm -qi) to emacs-X11 and emacs-nox, both of which no longer exist in Red Hat Linux 7.3. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. attempt to install emacs on a system without X libraries 2. 3. Actual Results: Emacs will not install and, if forced, will not start, due to missing libraries. Expected Results: It should be possible to use Emacs on a system with no X libraries installed. Additional info:
The description you'll get when installing specspo (which contains the official descriptions/summaries, the ones you'll see when installing) does not contain these references. Emacs now requires the X libraries, which is a separate, small package, to install. Not an oversight, but a way to avoid duplicate packages.