Ansible works on tasks, and to your hypothetical there, if you have a task that calls the package manager to put a package in the state ‘absent’, but it is another package’s dependency, it will have little to do with ansible, and just follow the package manager’s behaviour. (Up to some details. Like for ‘apt’, ansible runs the command with ‘-y’, which has a little different behaviour than just removing the interaction part and assuming yes). If the package manager removes the depending package, and your playbook has first a task that installs it, then a taks that removes the dependency, you will always get ‘changed’ on both tasks everytime you run the playbook, even if your playbook puts the machine in the same state as before.