According to the Ubuntu wiki, you can instruct dpkg
not to install any documentation. This should prevent any documentation (except copyright info) from being installed by apt.
Create a file /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/01_nodoc
which specifies the
desired filters. Example:
path-exclude /usr/share/doc/*
# we need to keep copyright files for legal reasons
path-include /usr/share/doc/*/copyright
# if you also want to remove the man pages uncomment the next line
#path-exclude /usr/share/man/*
path-exclude /usr/share/groff/*
path-exclude /usr/share/info/*
# lintian stuff is small, but really unnecessary
path-exclude /usr/share/lintian/*
path-exclude /usr/share/linda/*
Then you can manually remove any documentation already installed:
find /usr/share/doc -depth -type f ! -name copyright|xargs rm || true
find /usr/share/doc -empty|xargs rmdir || true
rm -rf /usr/share/groff/* /usr/share/info/*
rm -rf /usr/share/lintian/* /usr/share/linda/* /var/cache/man/*
If you also want to remove the man pages do:
rm -rf /usr/share/man/*
The example is written for OEMs, but it worked just as well for me. Took my /usr/share/doc/
directory down from ~150MB to ~20MB.