This change: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=4b50385e2c828f5ade20bd62b0cc145b0492d613 causes all of the RPM dependencies to be included in core-image-minimal even with no package-management enabled. This can clearly be seen with the poky-tiny distro. To reproduce: set DISTRO = "poky-tiny" in local.conf build: bitbake core-image-minimal icu should not be included, but is. You can also do this, which is much quicker bitbake -g core-image-minimal grep icu package-depends.dot, there should not be any target icu, there will be icu-natives.
*** Bug 4189 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=b450344ca7eaf8f7868d85052aca31d07b03aac8
verified on master branch. Commit ID:c42cc8fb38aee46f4778b9c68412a47ae5919923