trimming down Fedora installed size

[Andrew Price]

On 11/04/14 21:54, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 06:13:42PM +0100, Andrew Price wrote:
>> On 10/04/14 17:05, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>>> James Antill (james at fedoraproject.org) said:
>>>>   Not that I assume splitting lanauges and docs. into sub packages would
>>>> triple primary numbers, but if it did ... that would be bad.
>>>
>>> To put it in perspective, if we split out 'langpacks' for apps per language,
>>> something like gedit then grows *100* new subpackages.
>>>
>>> Bill
>>
>> It's a shame we can't store .mo files compressed.
>
> Unfortunately .mo files are mmapped and shared between processes, so
> compressing them wouldn't work :-(

That's what I thought :/

Just thinking out loud, but maybe with an updated gettext(3) it could 
work, but I guess it would require some hefty changes in libc, right? 
Unless programs could be linked against a "zintl" lib to provide an 
alternative gettext(3) perhaps. Either way it would need to be 
transparently backward compatible with the current .mo format and 
obviously there'd be performance concerns for some programs so they'd 
need to stick with the current implementation. Portability shouldn't be 
an issue though as .po files can be compiled to whatever .mo format the 
distro/package uses. I think there's potential for innovation in that 
area anyway, but it would need some momentum behind it.

Andy