F23 System Wide Change: Glibc locale subpackaging

[Jan Kurik]

= Proposed System Wide Change: Glibc locale subpackaging  =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Glibc_locale_subpackaging

Change owner(s):
* Mike Fabian <mfabian At redhat DOT com>
* Siddhesh Poyarekar <spoyarek AT redhat DOT com>
* Carlos O’Donell <codonell AT redhat DOT com>

This change should make it possible to install or uninstall locales individually. 

== Detailed Description ==
Currently the file /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive contains all locales and is thus huge (103MB).
For small systems (and containers) it would be useful to be able to install only a small number of locales.
Recently we made it possible to install a small number of locales by supplying the rpm-macro “_install_langs”, for example

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="en:de_DE" glibc-common.rpm

will install all English locales and all German locales which start with “de_DE”,

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="en_US.utf8" glibc-common.rpm

will install only the en_US.utf8 locale,

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="POSIX" glibc-common.rpm

will install nothing (but the POSIX/C is still available because it is builtin into glibc).

But this approach works only during an Anaconda based install when Anaconda supplies the _install_langs rpm-macro.
When glibc is updated later, the _install_langs macro will not be supplied on the command line during the update and the default value “all” of “_install_langs” from /usr/lib/rpm/macros will be used and all locales come back during an update.
Therefore, this solution is far from perfect.
It should be made possible to install and uninstall locales individually, for example by having a separate package for the locales for each language. Installing such a package would add these locales to locale-archive, uninstalling it would remove them.

Anaconda then needs to be changed to handle such language packages. 

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners: 
   1. Figure out the best approach to to install/uninstall locales
   2. Make sure that locales added manually by the user are not destroyed (currently they are lost when glibc is updated)
* Other developers: 
   Anaconda needs to be made aware of the new approach to handle installation/uninstallation of locales
* Release engineering: 
   I am not sure whether this has affects release engineering, probably the packages in the install image change when parts are split out of glibc-common.
* Policies and guidelines: 
   No, this change does not require updates to policies and guidelines.
* Trademark approval: not needed for this Change 
-- 
Jan Kuřík
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