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Glibc locale subpackaging

Summary

This change should make it possible to install or uninstall locales individually.

Owner

Name: Mike Fabian Siddhesh Poyarekar
Email: <mfabian At redhat DOT com, spoyarek AT redhat DOT com
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 23
Last updated: (2015-06-17)
Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Currently the file /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive contains

all* locales and is thus huge (103 megabytes).

For small systems (and containers) it would be useful to be able to install only a small number of locales.

Recently we made it possible to install a small number of locales by supplying the rpm-macro “_install_langs”, for example

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="en:de_DE" glibc-common.rpm

will install all English locales and all German locales which start with “de_DE”,

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="en_US.utf8" glibc-common.rpm

will install only the en_US.utf8 locale,

   rpm -i -D _install_langs="POSIX" glibc-common.rpm

will install nothing (but the POSIX/C is still available because it is builtin into glibc).

But this approach works only during an Anaconda based install when Anaconda supplies the _install_langs rpm-macro.

When glibc is updated later, the _install_langs macro will not be supplied on the command line during the update and the default value “all” of “_install_langs” from /usr/lib/rpm/macros will be used and all locales come back during an update.

Therefore, this solution is far from perfect.

It should be made possible to install and uninstall locales individually, for example by having a separate package for the locales for each language. Installing such a package would add these locales to locale-archive, uninstalling it would remove them.

Anaconda then needs to be changed to handle such language packages.

Benefit to Fedora

This change should make it possible to reduce the minimum size of an installation considerably.

Scope

Proposal owners:

   1. Figure out the best approach to to install/uninstall locales
   2. Make sure that locales added manually by the user are not destroyed (currently they are lost when glibc is updated)

Other developers:

Anaconda needs to be made aware of the new approach to handle installation/uninstallation of locales

Release engineering:

I am not sure whether this has affects release engineering, probably the packages in the install image change when parts are split out of glibc-common.

Policies and guidelines:

No, this change does not require updates to policies and guidelines.

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)