I've just installed pidgin using apt-get on a fairly minimal machine.
It caused a 100 MB download, including things such as freepats and
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad.

I'm not sure this is actually a pidgin bug, please feel free to reassign
it if you feel it's somebody else who has gotten their dependencies wrong.

                                        Juliusz

The killers seem to be the video / gstreamer items, and a few extras
from gnome integration.  As it's one of the best (and only)
applications of this nature; with kopete and empathy being pretty tied
to the DE's, pidgin is a great candidate for light-weight
installations.  However, these deps, of 150mb or so, make it tough.

While not ideal, what about creating a lighter-weight version of the
pidgin package (pidgin-light?), without gstreamer, vv, or gnome
configure options?