In Debian Lenny installing the package nagios-nrpe-server pulls in a load of dependencies. Nagios-plugins-standard samba and snmp and load of other stuff. Which i don’t need because we have our own nrpe plugins for nagios. To install nagios-nrpe-server without the dependencies issue the following command:

aptitude install -vv --show-deps --without-recommends nagios-nrpe-server

Which shows you the package dependencies but doesn’t install them.