Hi, In guix 1.4.0 there are 2 locale.alias files from glibc on the disk:
$ ls -liL --sort=size `find / -name locale.alias 2>/dev/null | grep -v X11` 940417 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/0dbscs8zq4bdg8vbn9jkdgynjcn3s01p-gcc-toolchain-12.2.0/share/locale/locale.alias 940417 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/5h2w4qi9hk1qzzgi1w83220ydslinr4s-glibc-2.33/share/locale/locale.alias 15716 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/ayc9r7162rphy4zjw8ch01pmyh214h82-glibc-2.33/share/locale/locale.alias 15716 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/c326489r6jvnl69l2nbmdvxmgzqln2hy-profile/share/locale/locale.alias 15716 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/isn13ca7419sj7myb3xr3i3zbxspky8c-profile/share/locale/locale.alias 15716 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 2998 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/yh51nb5dq9n6pw8mrdp3nxcfmxzmrp1x-profile/share/locale/locale.alias 1058938 -r--r--r-- 1 root root 261 Jan 1 1970 /gnu/store/wf46adk80fdc1qij8472n8r2xr4cln0a-gdm-42.0/share/gdm/locale.alias I explained the purpose of this file in https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2023-September/151524.html . In summary, it's a configuration file whose initial contents is provided for glibc, but which needs to be edited by the system administrator in some situations. For this reason, in Debian 12, the file has been moved to /etc/locale.alias, and /usr/share/locale/locale.alias is merely a symbolic link to /etc/locale.alias. IMO, this is the correct way to handle this configuration file. The way Guix handles this file provokes two problems: 1) When the system administrator wants to add a new alias, they have to search for all occurrences of the file in the (two) glibc installations. And if/when they install newer versions of glibc, they will have to reapply their change again and again. 2) GNU gettext needs to access this file, in order to recognize the same aliases that glibc recognizes. But glibc does not export the _nl_expand_alias function. Therefore GNU gettext needs to know where the file is. But how could GNU gettext retrieve any of the file names /gnu/store/5h2w4qi9hk1qzzgi1w83220ydslinr4s-glibc-2.33/share/locale/locale.alias /gnu/store/ayc9r7162rphy4zjw8ch01pmyh214h82-glibc-2.33/share/locale/locale.alias ? If Guix had this configuration file moved to /etc, like Debian did, GNU gettext could be compiled with '-DLOCALE_ALIAS_PATH=\"/etc\"' and would then be able to access it. Bruno
