In DITA, any topics that are referenced in topics you use in a publication become part of the dependency chain. For example, if you’re reusing elements from a topic that includes xrefs to other topics, those other topics become part of the dependency chain for your publication, even if you aren’t reusing the elements that contain the xrefs. In this case, if you are not reusing the topics that are the link targets of the xrefs, this will not cause publication errors—because you aren’t including the content that contains the links in your output. However, when you attempt to freeze your publication baseline, it will fail, and the Baseline Freeze report displays errors about references that cannot be resolved. If your baseline freeze activity fails after publishing an output with no errors in the log, submit an issue to the Infosolutions project.