[gentoo-dev] Reducing glibc's default locale.gen

[gentoo-dev] Reducing glibc's default locale.gen

[Matt Turner]

Hi,

Building 400~ locales is not fun on mips when building stages.

No user has a need for more than some small subset of the total
available locales.

I filed bug [1] to request the ability to select locales in catalyst
spec files, but no responses after six months -- which is totally
typical of catalyst bugs.

I commented in bug [2] suggesting that we perhaps reduce the default
locale.gen to only 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' or some other limited subset.

The default subset should be sufficient for a large number of users,
and users whose locales aren't shipped by default would simply be able
to edit /etc/locale.gen (which I'm sure almost everyone does anyway)
to select their desired locale and then run locale-gen to generate it
and remove unwanted locales.

Please provide feedback. I'd love to get this resolved one way or another.

Thanks,
Matt

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348454
[2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146882#c13

Re: [gentoo-dev] Reducing glibc's default locale.gen

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 15:53:01 Matt Turner wrote:
> No user has a need for more than some small subset of the total
> available locales.

the rub is in which locales the user cares about

> I filed bug [1] to request the ability to select locales in catalyst
> spec files, but no responses after six months -- which is totally
> typical of catalyst bugs.

i thought catalyst had a way of overlaying custom files.  if it does, couldnt 
you simply overlay the /etc/locale.gen file ?

> I commented in bug [2] suggesting that we perhaps reduce the default
> locale.gen to only 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' or some other limited subset.
> 
> The default subset should be sufficient for a large number of users,
> and users whose locales aren't shipped by default would simply be able
> to edit /etc/locale.gen (which I'm sure almost everyone does anyway)
> to select their desired locale and then run locale-gen to generate it
> and remove unwanted locales.

i dont think the subset should ever be arbitrarily reduced by whatever we feel 
like picking.  you could however make an argument about filtering the default 
set based on LINGUAS that my brain matter would be open to accepting.  feel 
free to open a glibc enhancement bug with a patch or PoC in that direction.
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Reducing glibc's default locale.gen

["Paweł Hajdan, Jr."]

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On 6/7/11 9:53 PM, Matt Turner wrote:
> Building 400~ locales is not fun on mips when building stages.

Do you have some data to quantify "not fun"? How long does it take?

> No user has a need for more than some small subset of the total
> available locales.
> 
> I filed bug [1] to request the ability to select locales in catalyst
> spec files, but no responses after six months -- which is totally
> typical of catalyst bugs.
> 
> I commented in bug [2] suggesting that we perhaps reduce the default
> locale.gen to only 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' or some other limited subset.

It makes sense to me, especially for "exotic" arches. It seems that
locale-gen is cheap anyway on x86 and amd64, where it probably matters most.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Reducing glibc's default locale.gen

[Matt Turner]

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On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 3:40 AM, "Paweł Hajdan, Jr." <phajdan.jr@gentoo.org>
wrote:
> On 6/7/11 9:53 PM, Matt Turner wrote:
>> Building 400~ locales is not fun on mips when building stages.
>
> Do you have some data to quantify "not fun"? How long does it take?

To build glibc

- once for the n32 ABI with only the en_US.UTF-8 locale: 1h 15m
- three times for o32/n32/n64 ABIs with only en_US.UTF-8: 4h 50m
- three times for o32/n32/n64 ABIs with all locales: 6h

I can reconfirm how long it takes just by running locale-gen on all locales,
but according to my numbers it takes 1h 10m to generate all the locales.

The o32/n32/n64 configuration is what I've been planning to ship as a
compromise between shipping only a single ABI and a set of stages for every
ABI, but each ABI adds significant time, and n32 replaces o32 so I'll just
plan to drop o32.

So roughly the time required to build all the locales is equal to the time
to build glibc for a single ABI.

>> No user has a need for more than some small subset of the total
>> available locales.
>>
>> I filed bug [1] to request the ability to select locales in catalyst
>> spec files, but no responses after six months -- which is totally
>> typical of catalyst bugs.
>>
>> I commented in bug [2] suggesting that we perhaps reduce the default
>> locale.gen to only 'en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8' or some other limited subset.
>
> It makes sense to me, especially for "exotic" arches. It seems that
> locale-gen is cheap anyway on x86 and amd64, where it probably matters
most.

Good, thanks for your feedback.

Matt

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