Created attachment 363210 [details, diff] Add an "nls" USE check. x11-libs/mx installs a whole bunch of translation files in /usr/share/locale because by default the configure script has --enable-nls. The attached patch uses the "nls" USE flag to toggle that.
As was noted in another bug report, USE=nls does not change build dependencies and only affects installed locales but we already have LINGUAS for that. As it also causes no extra compile time (not sensible even back when I used pentium I/II/III) if LINGUAS is set appropriately, this falls under the current policy that USE flags should not be used to control this like bash-completion, openrc init or systemd units. I will copy that to our policy since I could not remember why we stopped doing this years ago.
Right. The "nls" USE flag might make sense for parts of @system that may end up being build on extremely old/extremely small systems, but definitely not for gnome. However, it is good style for packages to respect the LINGUAS env variable to control which translations get installed, because people do get annoyed by translations for a hundred languages they will never use. Mx already respects LINGUAS as far as I can see, just like most other gnome packages, because its translation infrastructure is based on intltool. And ebuilds for packages that do not use intltool or equivalent can add explicit use-expand LINGUAS support using l10n.eclass. If you find some package that doesn't respect LINGUAS, please file a bug about it and make it block #405485
*** Bug 491212 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 491204 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 491180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
