Re: [gentoo-user] 200MB waste from /usr/share/locale ?

[Mike Edenfield]

On 11/25/2011 10:00 PM, Philip Webb wrote:
> 111126 Florian Philipp wrote:
>> Am 26.11.2011 01:28, schrieb Sebastian Pipping:
>>> It seems that /usr/share/locale is keeping files for many languages
>>> not of any use to me: around 200MB in total.
>>> Is there a way to configure this away that I am not aware of?
>> Please follow the section "glibc Locales" in the Gentoo handbook.
>> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap6
>
> Yes, but that may not be the problem.  I have just  2  locales requested,
> but  /etc/share/locale/  contains  90 MB  of material.
> A quick look suggests that most of it is in subdirs LC_MESSAGES ,
> wh seem to come from emerges at various dates;
> they are binary, so I don't know what they were reporting.
> Even under /usr/share/locale/en_US , which should show my  2  locales,
> there are only such messages.  The locales do seem to work.
>
> Can anyone explain what is going on ?

Different packages include different levels of support for 
filtering their installed localization messages, typically 
one of "install everything", "install what's requested", or 
"whats a locale?"

The reason you mostly have files under LC_MESSAGES is 
because that's 99% of what is needed to localize a package. 
The files in there are string resource packages, 
translations of the strings used by the program, which are 
picked up by the localization library (gettext) 
automatically based on your locale settings. (coreutils 
installs file into LC_TIME for locales with date/time 
formatting requirements; I don't think I've ever seen any 
other locale files.)

The standard way to inform a package which languages you 
want is to set your LINGUAS variable in /etc/make.conf to 
the locale name(s) you want installed (without the charset 
specifier). LINGUAS works like any other portage expansion 
variables: for those packages that support it, you get a set 
of USE-flag-like language keywords set on build. (LINGUAS is 
the well-known environment variable used by most 
autotools-based packages to select languages, but portage 
provides support above and beyond that.)

Unfortunately, proper locale support is spotty -- mostly due 
to upstream maintainers being too lazy to properly add it to 
their builds. Instead, the package will install every 
message file it has available all the time.

You can safely delete any folders from /usr/share/locale for 
locales that you don't have installed, since the normal 
locale support in glibc will never ask for them. But they'll 
just get put back next time you upgrade the package.

--Mike