The packages x11-xserver-utils and x11-apps both depend on cpp. Since
these are "miscellaneous assortment of X applications" and not
development tools, I think they should not depend on cpp.

There are people like myself, who like to keep their installations clean
and minimal, without packages that they don't need.

Or am I mistaken and cpp is needed for  x11-xserver-utils to work?

I am using Debian Wheezy

It is needed by xrdb.  In x11-apps I have not found any reference to
cpp, so the dependency should probably be removed there.

Cheers,
       Sven

control: tag -1 patch

Here is a trivial patch that makes it possible for the user to choose
(as a non-default option) to exclude cpp packages from xorg using
systems, at the cost of possibly breaking xrdb.

Best wishes,
Mike

With a patch moving the dep to a recommends it would be useful if xrdb
was configured with something like:

Hi,

* Michael Gilbert [Tue Jul 21, 2015 at 11:20:04PM -0400]:

I'd very much appreciate, if that patch (which moves cpp from
Depends to Recommends) could be considered for inclusion.

xrdb *seems* to work for me also without cpp available, and it also
supports a `-nocpp` option and also supports specifying a
preprocessor of custom choice via `-cpp ....`.

x11-xserver-utils requires only ~523 kB of disk space, while cpp and
its cpp-10 pulls in >26 MB of disk space, which is quite notable
e.g. for live systems. :-/

regards
-mika-