Comment 2 for bug 1706596

This has been reported to Debian as a feature request a while ago. Please refer to https://bugs.debian.org/741097 for the original bug report and discussion.

The bug is still open, but so far it appears that the Debian Octave packaging team is unlikely to put in the effort to create an octave-nox package.

In particular, please note that Octave has had a dependency on OpenGL for plotting since 2008. This dependency has nothing to do with whether Octave's GUI is being used or not.

Also note that Octave is built with support for loading Java libraries, which adds a dependency on the JRE.

Building Octave without the Qt GUI would save about 30 MB of storage due to Qt dependencies.

Building Octave without support for Java would save about 100 MB of storage due to Java dependencies.

You would also have to build Octave without any support for OpenGL plotting and without any support for image file I/O (imread, imwrite, etc) to allow it to be installed without any X11 libraries at all.

If this feature is important to you, you might want to try modifying the source package yourself and see what tradeoffs you can make and see whether it's actually worth the savings from fewer dependencies.