Comment 22 for bug 154349

@Vish: Please reconsider it as a papercut - whether for Lucid or later. I agree that a lot of desktop novices can live with it. But think of users with Netbooks, small SSDs or GSM modems. Installing "eclipse" with or without recommended dependencies makes a difference of about 100MB! Further this bug affects one of the big plus of Linux: the package management. And I think apart from calling this feature "advanced" the other criteria of a papercut are full-filled.

Meanwhile I use the workaround of Muhammad (comment #3). Just remember that since Jaunty the default is "1" so you might want to create /etc/apt/apt.conf with the line:

APT::Install-Recommends "0";