On 24/06/2019 17.25, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:04:11 +0200, Hans-Peter Jansen
wrote:
...
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/
...
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.
But separate packages for each language would be needed, for each application. This is a lot of packages, a packaging bloat. Only very large applications do this (libreoffice, for example). I can think of ideas. Wild, so pick with a grain of salt ;-) * Somehow making all language directories except those you want "be nil". Nothing can be written there, every write works like writing to /dev/nil. I can not imagine how to accomplish this. Apparmor? bind mounts to nil? or the reverse? * filesystem compression. Those files are basically text, they compress a lot. * A new rpm setting that makes installation skip the actual installation of marked or unmarked parts. * A script triggered somehow (cronjob?) that deletes unwanted languages. * Handle installation of languages outside of the rpm system (send a request per language-application pair and download it; generate the request when each application gets installed). Would need some type of new service and server. Makes mirror download server structure useless. * Create large packages containing "all" (or a big number of) applications in one language, thus download that language only. Could be one set per main pattern. Makes installation of a separate rpm difficult. Bloat of another kind. When a single application changes a single message, you have to update the full pattern-language-rpm. Is any of that work worth it? I don't think so. Me, I would prefer one of the filesystem "tricks" if I had to. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)