In article <199905022222.HAA02801@dingo.ping.net.au>,
	Berndt Josef Wulf <wulf@ping.net.au> writes:
> does someone know why emacs is needed when building gimp? Is it because
> of the docs? 

Yes, exactly.

> I managed to build gimp without emacs with only two warning messages
> during package registration.

There were caused by documentation files which were not built because
"emacs" is missing.

> Otherwise it appears to work fine and it seems to be such a waste of
> resources in installing emacs.

"gimp" is a big monster package with or without requiring "emacs".

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                http://home.owl.de/~tron/