[arch-general] Locale packages

[Eli Schwartz]

On 6/22/20 3:11 PM, Daan De Meyer via arch-general wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> While working on locale-gen support for systemd-firstboot (
> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/15994), I started wondering if it
> wouldn't be simpler to delegate the installation of locales to pacman
> instead. I haven't been following the mailing lists for very long so I
> don't know if this has ever been discussed. I'd imagine Arch could provide
> a package for each locale supported by glibc and users would install the
> ones they need.

Very firm -1 to any approach that involves creating hundreds of new
packages which each provide a tiny file.

> The PKGBUILD would use localedef to generate separate folders of compiled
> locale files for each locale that would be stored in /usr/lib/locale. This
> approach is already implemented by distros such as Fedora (and co) and
> Ubuntu.
> 
> The main advantage of this approach is that there's no need to set up an
> entire chroot to run locale-gen when pacstrapping a new Arch system image.
> This might seem easy but becomes trickier when the image uses a different
> architecture than the host system since emulation of that architecture has
> to be set up first. Even if locale-gen had a --root option so using the
> host's locale-gen would be an option, I'm not sure if there's any guarantee
> that compiled locale definitions generated by the host system's locale-gen
> would work with the glibc version used by the image (less of a problem with
> Arch but the glibc on the host could still potentially be out-of-date
> compared to the one installed in the image). Being able to install locales
> with pacman would solve all these problems.
> 
> Any interest in something like this from the Arch developers? I'd be
> willing to try my hand at a PKGBUILD for this but I'm not a TU so I'd need
> some support to get this implemented (if there is any interest at all).
> 
> (This also doesn't imply that locale-gen wouldn't work anymore, locale-gen
> stores everything in /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive which would be
> independent from the files installed by the locale packages, so both
> approaches should work side-by-side)

This is not about locale-gen. locale-gen (and /etc/locale.gen) are
Arch-specific custom scripts which IIRC were copied from Debian once
upon a time, which just run localedef. I actually use a much simpler
locale-gen program which uses flag files e.g. /etc/locales/en_US (file
contents can contain a charset but are otherwise assumed to be UTF-8).
It's not hard to hack your own.

IIRC Fedora follows the "hundreds of packages which each provide a small
file" approach, that being the localedef --no-archive intersection of a
locale and a charmap. The combination of all possibilities will result
in significant size bloat, so it is not feasible to provide them all in
the glibc package itself. (e.g. try uncommenting all 487 locales in
/etc/locale.gen and it is a 500MB locale-archive, "only" 100MB if you
stick to UTF-8 locales)

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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