On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:25:37 +0200
"H.Merijn Brand"
On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:04:11 +0200, Hans-Peter Jansen
wrote: Am Montag, 24. Juni 2019, 15:06:43 CEST schrieb Ignacio Taranto:
On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 15:26, Michael Pujos
wrote: Does having a lot of packages you do not use slow down the system ? I
No, unless the additional unwanted packages contains services enabled by default (do not know an example about this, but it could be possible). But I'm sure as hell it slows down updates.
Speaking of bloat:
$ du -sh /usr/share/locale/ 811M /usr/share/locale/
Worse
openSUSE Tumbleweed 20190621 $ du -sh /usr/share/locale/ 1.3G /usr/share/locale/
And I would love an option to *not* install Thai, Japanese, Chinese and other locales and localized messages that I won't use. Not that I mind on my development laptop, but having this on servers in the cloud rapidly adds to the total space and if the server is known to only need say English and Dutch (or whatever language the server is to support) having all the others is a bit of a burden on the disk space (and thus the backups/snapshots)
FWIW this is not a new problem. I've seen it with e.g. HP-UX that by default came with all supported locales installed (way less than what Linux supports) and I had to remove all those Asian locales before I had enough disk-space to install packages I *did* need.
I do understand the need for all those locales on install, where people choose the language the want to install the distribution in, but a (new) option to exclude (groups of) locales would be welcomed IMHO.
The locale definitions are much smaller than the generated locales. An alternative that some distributions do is generating only selected locales (ie the ones the user selected on installation). This saves a lot of space and bandwidth but is very time-consuming (ie on Raspberry Pi). An additional improvement to that is - select locales to generate/install - select either full pre-generated locales package or definition-only package for which the selected locales are generated on installation However, that's more options to test and support. Thanks Michal