On Thu, Dec 05, 2024 at 01:02:29PM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote: > Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the argument about wasting disk > space, and I care about the size of the base system myself. But I think > the primary affordance we make for such use cases is for core system > packages to have separate -l10n packages *at all* (whereas many packages > just ship localization directly in the main package).
Many, but not all. For example, bash and coreutils ship /usr/share/locale files in the base package. I recently added a "rm -rf /usr/share/locale" to the build kvm-xfstests test appliance, and it saved 16 megabytes in the compressed qemu-img test appliance. (And this was *without* my installing any *-l10n packages, including not installing e2fsprogs-l10n.) > > I agree that we should take a more opinioned stance in Debian Policy. > > https://bugs.debian.org/1089110 I've looked at this bug, but unlessed I missed something, this seems to be "rm -rf /usr/share/locale" shouldn't cause binaries to core dump. I'm guessing this is the reason for the "beware of the leopard" vibe in the documentation of localepurge package? I didn't realize binaries would be so ill-behaved as to crash if the locale files were missing. Sigh... Perhaps we should have a separate debian policy proposal which explicitly makes a requirement that the locale files should be separated for anything installed by default by debootstrap, and what the dependency priority of the *-l10n package should be? - Ted
