Replacing glibc langpacks
I'm investigating whether it makes sense to switch to a scheme where the
glibc locale data is built from source, during package installation,
based on the langpack configuration system. This is similar to what
Debian does.
The reason is that the compressed locale source code (without the
charmaps, which are not strictly needed once we patch localedef) is
smaller than the subset of locales of a langpack package which people
actually. For example, glibc-langpack-en on Fedora 29 is 6.7 MiB when
installed, but en_US.utf8 is 2.9 MiB, and the locale sources are
3.4 MiB, so even the common case realizes a small saving.
For the installer, the savings might be much larger. If we can teach
anaconda to generate the appropriate locale only after the user has
selected the language, then we no longer need the full locale archive in
the installation image (and in RAM).
Thanks,
Florian