Re: Frequent locales problems for new users

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 04:37:05PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Thoughts?  How do other distros deal with this?  Are we missing some
>> trick to compress locale data?
>
> I noticed that downloading glibc-locales, it's 10.8 MiB. On disk, the
> store item is ~220 MiB. I'm not sure how guix size calculates 917 MiB.

Oh, this is due to hard links: nars don’t support hard links, so the
same thing is repeated several times.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix archive --export glibc-locales |wc -c
961328272
$ du -hsl $(guix build glibc-locales)
939M    /gnu/store/03nvilh2x4z07dxv7h13gh986vvgpnsf-glibc-locales-2.29
$ du -hs $(guix build glibc-locales)
220M    /gnu/store/03nvilh2x4z07dxv7h13gh986vvgpnsf-glibc-locales-2.29
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

(It does mean that we should replace hard links with symlinks, like we
do for ‘git’.)

Doing that with the full set of UTF-8 locales I mentioned in my previous
message, I see:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ du -hsl /gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
870M	/gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
$ du -hs /gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
193M	/gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

To compare to:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ du -hs $(guix build glibc-utf8-locales)
6.1M	/gnu/store/n79cf8bvy3k96gjk1rf18d36w40lkwlr-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
$ du -hsl $(guix build glibc-utf8-locales)
15M	/gnu/store/n79cf8bvy3k96gjk1rf18d36w40lkwlr-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Thanks,
Ludo’.