Comment 9 for bug 626700

Re-read your policy quote: "This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.". Gnumeric can work without evince (so not absolute), but you lose features, and AFAIK, it's doesn't degrade gracefully (no feedback at all except in .xsession-errors?).

Anyway, we're not going to make xubuntu/gnumeric users lose features because the software-center spec is a bit "special" (not to say it's too late in the release development cycle). But, since we merge it from Debian, if you can convince the Debian maintainer to demote evince to Suggests, it'll be changed in ubuntu as well with the next merge (same if upstream adds a graceful fallback).