I'd have thought au jour d'ui 227MB qualifies as small, no? It's averaging at 500kB/package which is bigger than I thought (I'd have thought more like 50k tops, tbh) but it seems like it'd be a relatively manageable size for a one-off setup...
A compiler or browser release or a couple weeks worth of system updates are probably a comparable size? I'm also wondering whether your point that you get all locales together would imply that the locale test can simply check for a couple ones that are not commonly together, amd if that fails ask to install a complete package? After all if a developer can't spare a couple hundred megs is not like they'll be able to build much on their machine, nor use it for much longer that day anyways... L On Tue, 29 Nov 2022, 15:14 Werner LEMBERG, <w...@gnu.org> wrote: > > > Question: I would have thought locales would be a) largely present, > > b) small and easy to install as dependencies, like many other > > dependencies we have (and substantially less prone to change than > > any software dependency) > > > > Where does the concern with locales not being available on a system > > come from? > > It's often not installed, and it lacks standardization. And no, > locales are not small and easy but quite heavy instead – the > `/usr/lib/locale` directory on my openSUSE GNU/Linux box provides 494 > locales and has a whopping size of 227MByte, mainly for collation and > character type information. Normally, you won't get a single locale > as a separate package, which forces you to install all of them. > > > Werner >
