On Mon, 27 May 2019 at 10:41, Florian Weimer <fweimer(a)redhat.com> wrote:
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).
In other words your proposition is *not* about not any kind of
reduction size but increase size of installed resources because those
binary files which needs to be present will be increased by source of
those binary files. Other thing is that generating those files on
install-time elongates install time.
Remember that dpkg does not have any kind equivalent of rpm %lang()
tagging in packages descriptions.
In that exactly context Fedora still does not properly setups
/etc/rpm/macros::%_install_langs macro and instead setting that macro
during install-time provides langpack packages (which IMO is at least
engendering/design mistake/misunderstanding).
kloczek
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Tomasz Kłoczko | LinkedIn:
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