Comment # 26 on bug 948804 from Michael Matz

glibc-locale is a 120MB package, it contains charset converters, localized
message catalogs for glibc messages and the locale definitions (e.g. what's the
currency symbol), and such.  All of those have defaults for when locales aren't
available.  So what ideally would happen is that libguile doesn't throw error
messages when glibc-locale isn't installed (and instead just uses defaults),
so that the user is free to minimize his install size.

But I agree with comment #12, that's not something for a distro-specific patch,
it should be upstream.  As to what would need to happen for this to be the
case: that obviously depends on what libguile uses the locale stuff for, and
making
this optional.  That's something for guile developers.