Gfrktyl

I wanted to install Doxygen on my server, but I did not do it through apt-get, because it necessarily came with x11 packages.

    # apt-get install doxygen

    The following extra packages will be installed:

    (...)

    x11-utils x11-xserver-utils xbitmaps xdg-utils

    xfonts-encodings xfonts-utils xterm

    (...)

    After this operation, 578 MB of additional disk space will be used.

    Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n

    Abort.

578 MB is quite a lot, and I guess most of it would have been spent on the graphical environment that I would not use anyway.

So I decided to compile Doxygen from the source code, but I still wonder if there is a clean Debian way to do it. I also encountered a similar problem while trying to get the pdflatex command.

That's just crazy. On my system, it wanted to add 700 MB! For my purposes, I got by with just downloading the binary tarball and extracting the single doxygen binary (26MB) into a bin directory.

Downloads are here: http://www.doxygen.nl/download.html

The nice thing about apt is it installs all the required dependencies. You can compile from source but it might not run correctly due to unmet dependencies.

If apt is telling you that you need to install other pieces of software its probably a good idea to do so.

Yes, there is an easy way to avoid this. The X11 packages are pulled by the recommended packages configuration, more exactly by the recommended doxygen-latex package — this is in Debian 7 (Wheezy), see note below for Debian 8. Debian automatically installs any recommended packages and, because of the latex and ghostscript automatic dependencies, a lot of X11 packages are then installed.

In your specific case, if you don't need Doxygen to generate latex documents, you can avoid installing the recommended packages by calling apt-get with the --no-install-recommends option. This results in the following installation:

# apt-get install --no-install-recommends doxygen

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

Suggested packages:

  doxygen-doc doxygen-gui graphviz

Recommended packages:

  doxygen-latex

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  doxygen

0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 2578 kB of archives.

After this operation, 7348 kB of additional disk space will be used.

You can also configure Debian to avoid all recommended packages for any installation. Check this other SU question to see how. But, unless you want a specific purpose machine with the minimal set of packages, I wouldn't recommend it.

On Debian 8 (Jessie), the doxygen packagers have moved this one dependency (doxygen-latex) from the Recommends: field to the Suggests: field. As suggested packages are not installed by default, a regular install of doxygen on Debian 8 isn't so heavy.