[opensuse-factory] Re: openSUSE is bloated! (Click-bait intentional)

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 18:13:17 +0200, Michal Suchánek wrote:

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:50:19 +0200 Andreas Schwab wrote:

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On Jun 24 2019, Michal Suchánek wrote:

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The locale definitions are much smaller than the generated locales.

/usr/share/locale contains the translations (*-lang packages), not the locales.

$ du -sh /usr/lib/locale 222M /usr/lib/locale (out of which less than 5 Mb is used for en + nl) The more reason to be able to filter installed parts of -lang packages on "used locales". I've just selected (recursively) what TW would use in /usr/share/locale if I just want en, en_US, and Dutch, and that sums to ± 28Mb, which means that a mere 2% of that disk space will actually be used

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Andreas.

Indeed, the locales are in /usr/lib/locale and take 116M (except LC_TIME is stuffed in /usr/share/locale at least in some cases for some reason) . If you have a lot of translated messages that is proportional to a the amount of applications installed. The translated messages are typically small compared to the application. In this case packaging the translation separately is not going to be effective.

Exceptions do exist - ie OpenOffice used to do language-specific builds of large parts of the application to be able to offer more locale-specific customization (possibly UI layout and graphics) rather than plain message translation.

And HTML (in many languages), which I have never ever (knowingly) used: $ du -sh /usr/share/doc/HTML 298M /usr/share/doc/HTML FWIW I fully support packages/products to translate their product into as many languages as possible: it lowers the threshold for many to use these open-source products. I also know it takes an awful lot of time of volunteers to make *and maintain* these translations. In summary, I rather have all translations of the products I choose to install, including those that I don't care about, than have products that put their time (and effort) into creating options to skip unwanted locales. They have better things to do. Maybe we just need a new "tool" that cleans up the system of unwanted locales and parts of -lang packages after an installation of update has finished.

Michal

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