Why does Imlib have so many dependencies (when Enlightenment has so few)?
One does not build a house on a faulty foundation or on stony, unrelenting earth. Enlightenment tries to be as versatile, forgiving, and capable as possible. One of the ways it does this is to accept just about any kind of graphics format you throw at it. The idea is to be able to pick up a graphic from any source, with no knowledge, and plug it into a/your/someone else’s theme. Enlightenment itself is a pure window manager; that is, it deals with your windows’ fight between space and efficiency. It has a special graphics library, Imlib, to handle absolutely all graphics requests, and that means handling all graphic formats that are likely to show up as well. To do this efficiently and with the most precision, with as little overhead as possible, it doles it out to the programming routines that are already efficient, use as little overhead, and are tested and true: the specific graphic libraries who support these propietary graphic formats and can understand them best.