+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #875606 +++

In short:
Gnome cannot installed without the whole CUPS.

Reason:
gnome-control-center has a hard RPM requirement for cups-pk-helper
and cups-pk-helper has a hard RPM requirement for cups.

For SLE12 this was fixed in gnome-control-center by lowering
'Requires' to 'Recommends' for cups-pk-helper, see in OBS
SUSE:SLE-12:GA/gnome-control-center/gnome-control-center.changes  

But:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ osc cat SUSE:SLE-12:GA gnome-control-center gnome-control-center.spec \
 | grep cups-pk-helper
Recommends:     cups-pk-helper

$ osc cat openSUSE:Factory gnome-control-center gnome-control-center.spec \
 | grep cups-pk-helper
Requires:       cups-pk-helper
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
=> bug still present in gnome-control-center in openSUSE:Factory


Only FYI:

>From some time ago on one of my SLE12 test systems an analysis
what actually had required cups at that time
(the rpm output is shown condensed here by me):
------------------------------------------------------------------------
rpm -e --test cups-client
error: Failed dependencies:
cups-client needed by cups-1.7.2-6.1.x86_64

# rpm -e --test cups
error: Failed dependencies:
cups needed by cups-pk-helper-0.2.5-3.61.x86_64
cups needed by patterns-sles-print_server-12-28.1.x86_64
cups needed by system-config-printer-1.4.4-1.3.x86_64

# rpm -e --test system-config-printer
[no output - i.e. nothing requires it]

# rpm -e --test patterns-sles-print_server
[no output - i.e. nothing requires it]

# rpm -e --test cups-pk-helper
error: Failed dependencies:
cups-pk-helper needed by cups-pk-helper-lang-0.2.5-3.61.noarch
cups-pk-helper needed by gnome-control-center-3.10.3-1.3.x86_64

# rpm -e --test cups-pk-helper-lang
[no output - i.e. nothing requires it]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

When gnome-control-center has a hard RPM requirement for cups-pk-helper
it must mean that gnome-control-center cannot run without it
or that gnome-control-center does not make any sense without it.

When gnome-control-center can run without cups-pk-helper
in a reasonable way, then gnome-control-center should
not have a hard RPM requirement for cups-pk-helper
but only a weak RPM "Recommends" for it.

This way cups-pk-helper (and CUPS) would be usually installed
when gnome-control-center is installed (via zypper's "--recommends")
but when a user deliberately does not want to have CUPS installed,
the RPMs cups and cups-client could be removed without violating
hard RPM requirements.

In contrast the cups-libs RPM is usually needed by many other
software packages that link with the CUPS libraries
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
# rpm -e --test cups-libs 2>&1 \
 | grep -o 'needed by .*' | cut -d ' ' -f4 | sort -u
cups-1.7.2-6.1.x86_64
cups-client-1.7.2-6.1.x86_64
cups-filters-1.0.52-7.1.x86_64
cups-filters-cups-browsed-1.0.52-7.1.x86_64
cups-filters-ghostscript-1.0.52-7.1.x86_64
cups-pk-helper-0.2.5-3.61.x86_64
ghostscript-9.14-1.11.x86_64
gnome-control-center-3.10.3-1.3.x86_64
gnome-settings-daemon-3.10.2-7.2.x86_64
hplip-hpijs-3.14.4-2.3.x86_64
libgtk-2_0-0-2.24.23-1.23.x86_64
libgtk-3-0-3.10.7-1.35.x86_64
patterns-sles-base-12-28.1.x86_64
python-cups-1.9.66-1.3.x86_64
samba-libs-4.1.6-5.1.x86_64
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Summary:
It is o.k. when Gnome links with CUPS libraries
but I wonder if Gnome really cannot work without the
whole rest of CUPS (in particular a running cupsd).