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? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org