On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 08:28:03PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote: > The bulk of libc6 package consists of gconv files for obsolete locales. > This costs us 8.2MB per arch, even for minimal containers.
Indeed, gconv files are >10% of minimal containers right now: $ podman run -it --rm debian:unstable-slim root@5afbafb696c0:/# du -hs --one-file-system / 81M / root@5afbafb696c0:/# du -hs --one-file-system /usr/lib/*/gconv 8.2M /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gconv > Fedora has done so, then lowered the dependency to Recommends last year: > https://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Gconv_package_split_in_glibc > They've decided to keep a handful of often used old locales, which is > probably reasonable. Specifically, this is the relevant fragment from the Fedora package with the regexp that matches which locales to keep in the main glibc package: # The primary gconv converters are in the glibc package, the rest goes # into glibc-gconv-extra. The Z9 and Z900 subpatterns are for # s390x-specific converters. The -name clause skips over files # that are not loadable gconv modules. split_sysroot_file_list \ %{_libdir}/gconv '-name *.so' \ 'gconv/ (CP1252 |ISO8859-15? |UNICODE |UTF-[0-9]+ |ISO-8859-1_CP037_Z900 |UTF(8|16)_UTF(16|32)_Z9 )\.so$' \ gconv-extra.filelist glibc.filelist Source: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/glibc/blob/rawhide/f/glibc.spec#_1896 > Thus: could you please move the gconv files to a new package; with a > hard dependency from libc6 for now? Agreed! Shipping ancient DOS codepages and EBCDIC to every Debian system in 2025 feels just wasteful to me :) It's great that Fedora has already paved the way here and did most of the hard work! I don't know how your appetite is in doing this for trixie, but I'd personally love to see this happen. Thank you so much for your work on glibc regardless! Regards, Faidon
