Unwanted RPM dependencies -size of glibc-common locales

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 06:38:00AM +1000, David Timms wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> >On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 22:59 +1000, David Timms wrote:
> >>My second size concern comes from glibc-common, specifically the 
> >>/usr/share/locale {283 MB}  ( but also and  /usr/share/i18n/ 10MB)

glibc-common doesn't have that amount of data in /usr/share/locale,
only approx. 2.7MB.
The only large thing about glibc-common is /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
(~ 80MB) and that would be a terribly bad idea to split it up,
as many locales in that archive share the bigger data files, so if
you split it up, it will only occupy many times more disk space.
Unlike FC6 which duplicated the locales (there were /usr/lib/locale/*_*
subdirectories and the same content packed in
/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive, so it occupied ~ 160MB), in F7 it occupies
only half of the FC6 size.

> >Note that you can have RPM not install properly "tagged" locale files
> >not installed by setting the %_install_langs rpm macro.
> Can the installer do this ? I have already told the installer I want 
> language X and other support for lang Y-m. Should the installer be 
> setting this macro before it starts installing stuff ? How much quicker 
> could the install be if it the installer didn't have to install the 
> locale/language support a user doesn't want or need ? And all future 
> package operations use the setting, whether from rpm/yum/pirut ?
> This sounds like it could be the way to go about it for the general user 
> case ?

anaconda used to do that for years but stopped doing so a few years ago
because the disadvantages (not being able to get at the additional locales
not chosen at install time easily) overweight the advantages (diskspace
is cheap).
In OLPC or on boxes you know you will never need anything but a few
selected locales you can set %_install_langs, e.g. from kickstart.

	Jakub