I am in the process of porting some working applications from my development system to the target system, involving some drastic reduction in storage size. target final size ~ 1G. for immdiate need, I can even live with 2GB. starting point ~ 3.5 GB right now.

I thought it would be relatively easy to just uninstall all the development lib and achieve the reduction. however, it seems some features I consider for development is so tightly interwoven with essential linux components, I am not able to do this.

case in point, I tried to remove gnu compiler using synaptic, but with it go apt and apache2. I can maybe do without apt, but need apache2 for sure. without apt, I can not simply add back apache2 afterwards.

can someone give guidance how this can be done? which dev package should I attack?

If you remove gcc you're pretty much asking for a broken system. The compiler is an essential tool and should not be removed. If you want that drastic reduction in size i'd recommend using a lightweight windows manager instead of a desktop environment, something like fluxbox or such as that will decrease the size by alot. Also search through all your *-dev packages and you can probably remove most of them, but things like libc-dev and such should stay. Overall the best way to reduce in size would be a fresh new lightweight install and then just copy your important configuration files over. Trying to reduce our current size by over 1/2 is going to be alot harder then just reinstalling and adding few packages.

what you are saying is in agreement with my current experience. I am very curious though, why should essential packages like apt and apache2 be bundled with gnu compiler? what would you need a compiler for if there is no need to work with source code? is there some common sense guideline for how these packages are bundled?

You can also remove the -doc packages along with installing localepurge select only the locale you want to remain that should get you probably at least about 500mb back.

thanks, I already know that trick.

Ask the maintainers, but I'm pretty sure they have a good reason. Altough the concept of a GNU/Linux system without the GNU C Compiler is pretty sad in my opinion. I think that apt itself uses gcc for alot of things like when configuring locales and things such as that, some packages apt-get can install it compiles parts of them to optimize and such, although few packages do that. While apache2 on the other hand I'd have more trouble explaining why it requires it.