Hi Leo,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 04:07:22PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> As for ‘glibc-utf8-locales’ vs. ‘glibc-locales’: the reason for choosing
>> the former by default over the latter is size (14 MiB vs. 917 MiB).
>
> Oof! I was going by the manual, which says 110 MiB. That does change
> things...

Yes, I was also surprised.

The patch below produces a package that includes all the UTF-8 locales
(actually I had written that patch long ago, it feels like we’re running
in circles :-)).

It takes ages to build, and when it’s finally done:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ ./pre-inst-env guix build -e '((@@ (gnu packages base) make-glibc-utf8-locales/full))' 
substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0%
substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0%
substituting /gnu/store/jdfs3xvlnj272475yja6bjrprfsgnkdd-glibc-2.29...
downloading from https://ci.guix.gnu.org/nar/lzip/jdfs3xvlnj272475yja6bjrprfsgnkdd-glibc-2.29...
 glibc-2.29  8.2MiB                                                       1.8MiB/s 00:05 [##################] 100.0%

building /gnu/store/w08zi9vnkd7bxpfvm5lgjyb30i7k7sw4-glibc-supported-utf8-locales.scm.drv...
successfully built /gnu/store/w08zi9vnkd7bxpfvm5lgjyb30i7k7sw4-glibc-supported-utf8-locales.scm.drv
building /gnu/store/ps6wh05pwjp5b0l9rh2yglv3sggpgcw4-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29.drv...
successfully built /gnu/store/ps6wh05pwjp5b0l9rh2yglv3sggpgcw4-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29.drv
/gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29
ludo@ribbon ~/src/guix$ guix size /gnu/store/p0knl9ggxk91x87ww702g2x78jxy1vgf-glibc-utf8-locales-2.29 | tail -1
total: 855.7 MiB
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

So I think that’s when we reached the conclusion that we needed
parameterized packages to allow users to choose the locale(s) they need
or special support in ‘guix package’.

:-/

Attached is the list of supported UTF-8 locales, 312 in total.

Thoughts?  How do other distros deal with this?  Are we missing some
trick to compress locale data?

Ludo’.