Trying to slim down my installation

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 03:49:04PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 12:21 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >>On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 14:26 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> >>
> >>>If you really want to reduce the disk footprint of your installation,
> >>>you want to check out %_install_langs to only install the locales you
> >>>really care about. Sadly, this is a very neglected feature of rpm, and
> >>>we don't really support this or expose it in any usable fashion...
> >>
> >>Mandriva uses it by default. The big drawback to this is that, if you
> >>install the system and _subsequently_ enable a locale, you don't get the
> >>locale-specific files for that locale for any package that was installed
> >>as part of the initial installation. Which is a bit of a bummer.
> >
> >Right, this is what I meant by supporting this and making it usable...
> 
> Additionally rpm -Va will report missing files iirc

No, not really. 'rpm -Va' will not find anything amiss.
'rpm -qs <package>' will report assorted "not installed" for those
files which were skipped.

This also reduces effectivness of yum-presto as deltas will not
apply if some package files could not be found on a disk.  There are
packages which will be complete, so they will not suffer from that,
but this is another trade-off.

If somebody wants to experiment then a good way is to add a file
/etc/rpm/macros.lang with a line in it in this style:

%_install_langs  C:en:pl:fr:ru

To reverse or modify effects you will have to 'rpm -U --force ...'-install
all packages for which '--state' (i.e. -s) rpm query option reports
"non installed" files.  What was already installed will not
magically change because you added/modified %_install_langs but
updates will honour that.

   Mkichal