Comment 0 for bug 1401390

There appears to be a package dependency cascade that occurred approx 12 hours ago. Attempting to install libboost-all-dev causes this: "0 upgraded, 791 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded."

The 791 packages include much of the gnome and kde desktops, a web browser, some chat clients, all of X11 .. which is crazy for a package needed to compile C++ programs for a server.

I traced the dependencies: its a rather long, boring chain ... it depends on stuff which depends on libboost-mpi1.54.0 which causes 694 packages to be installed

Tracing through eventually leads to libhwloc5 which seems like it should be harmless .. but that leads to libopencl1 which is a virtual package. If you recall, opencl is a GPU general-purpose-computing thing, so, unsurprisingly, we see a dependence on nvidia:

Package libopencl1 is a virtual package provided by:
  nvidia-libopencl1-331-updates 331.113-0ubuntu0.0.4
  nvidia-libopencl1-331 331.113-0ubuntu0.0.4
  nvidia-libopencl1-304-updates 304.125-0ubuntu0.0.1
  nvidia-libopencl1-304 304.125-0ubuntu0.0.1
  ocl-icd-libopencl1 2.1.3-4

Next: apt-get install nvidia-libopencl1-331-updates results in: 0 upgraded, 681 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

Tracing through that, we get to nvidia-331-updates which requires nvidia-prime which causes this:
0 upgraded, 696 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

This is on a server that doesn't have a graphics card ..

It appears that nvidia-prime is the prime suspect, here: somehow, libhwloc5 , through libopencl, requies nvidia drivers to be installed, but the nvidia drivers require a package that cause the gnome+kde desktops to be installed ...