How can I force apt to optimize the dependency tree for minimal download size?

Solution 1:

You could always have apt list all the dependencies then by hand you could install the packages that you would rather install but I've searched man pages and several forums but I could not answer your exact question other than rewriting the source to apt that's how opensource works anyways.

Solution 2:

As far as I know, there is no way to optimize that. Most things are already greatly compressed, so you don't download nearly the whole file size. (Next time you install a package, take a look at the difference between the amount of data to be downloaded and the total hard drive space to be consumed.)

If you know what you're doing, (e.g., you already installed foo, but it says that you need to reinstall it,) and want to leave all the dependencies off when you install a file, add the flag --no-install-recommends.
Some of the answers to this question explain how to install specific packages without the dependencies. They covered it quite a bit deeper than I did, so if you're still having trouble or my answer didn't solve your problem, I'd recommend taking a look at that thread.