This hasn't been updated for a while, and it remains yet to be
demonstrated that not using a locale archive has a significant
performance impact. Right now it is done that way to allow locales to be
updated/added/removed without building all the others all over again,
and to be able to use LOCPATH.
I think this is the real rationale, from belocs-locales-bin 2.3.4-2:
* sbin/locale-gen: Do not call localedef with --no-archive flag by
default. A new --archive command line flag is added.
The rationale is that with an archive it is not possible to mix
system and user defined locale
Why does using locale-archive require regenerating all locales on every
update? locale-archive is basically equivalent to keeping all the locale
data in a single giant file (which can be searched efficiently) rather
than in a directory tree.
--
Research the adoption of locale-archive by default
h
Removing milestone. This is not release critical at all, and still
requires actual benchmarks to verify that the startup time reduction
justifies the cost of always regenerating all locales on every update or
installation/removal of language support.
** Changed in: belocs-locales-bin (Ubuntu)
This has been done deliberately in Debian to avoid the necessity to
regenerate all locales with every new glibc or langpack update, and we
just followed that.
Does it actually reduce startup time significantly?
** Changed in: belocs-locales-bin (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided => Low
Assign
I've changed my configuration to create a locale-archive by default now,
to see what kind of impact it has and any bugs that appear as a result:
* Edit /etc/belocs/locale-gen.conf
* Change ARCHIVE=no to ARCHIVE=yes
* Run sudo locale-gen --purge
You should now see only one file (/usr/lib/locale
