F23 System Wide Change: Glibc locale subpackaging

[Alexander Larsson]

On mån, 2015-06-22 at 06:16 -0400, Jan Kurik wrote:
> = 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.

Do they really have to modify locale-archive? Can't each package
install separate archive files (say, based on the locale name).
Packaging optional extra files is a lot easier for me in my work with
an xdg-app runtime based on fedora.


-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
He's an immortal small-town gentleman spy on his last day in the job. 
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