It uses all the same backends and all of those need their dependencies filling. As such, a lot of garb you wouldn't be able to even use on a headless server gets pulled in.
I don't think there's a clean way around that short of formally separating the two projects and cherry-picking code from the pidgin backends and pulling that into Finch.
You should contact developers at <email address hidden> and bring this to their attention.
Since this is the intended behaviour, I am closing this bug report.
Finch is just a CLI for Pidgin.
It uses all the same backends and all of those need their dependencies filling. As such, a lot of garb you wouldn't be able to even use on a headless server gets pulled in.
I don't think there's a clean way around that short of formally separating the two projects and cherry-picking code from the pidgin backends and pulling that into Finch.
You should contact developers at <email address hidden> and bring this to their attention.
Since this is the intended behaviour, I am closing this bug report.