[arch-general] Including compiled C.UTF-8 locale by default in glibc package? Inbox

[Daan De Meyer]

Hi,

Now that glibc 2.35 is available, could we enable and ship the
compiled form of the new C.UTF-8 locale in glibc by default in Arch
Linux?

>From the glibc 2.35 release notes
(https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2022-February/136040.html):

> * Support for the C.UTF-8 locale has been added to glibc.  The locale
>   supports full code-point sorting for all valid Unicode code points.  A
>   limitation in the framework for fnmatch, regexec, and regcomp requires
>   a compromise to save space and only ASCII-based range expressions are
>   supported for now (see bug 28255).  The full size of the locale is
>   only ~400KiB, with 346KiB coming from LC_CTYPE information for
>   Unicode.  This locale harmonizes downstream C.UTF-8 already shipping
>   in various downstream distributions.  The locale is not built into
>   glibc, and must be installed.

Being able to rely on the existence of a UTF-8 english locale
simplifies many use cases. A good example of issues introduced due to
a lack of a built-in UTF-8 locale is
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/8340 which is a workaround
added in 2018 that still exists today. Having the C.UTF-8 locale
available by default in Arch would enable removing such workarounds.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Daan De Meyer