TL;DR: Omit locale-archive on stage tarballs, or reduce it to a minimal set of locales via locale.gen. Substantial space savings in both tarballs & on-disk size. This bug is NOT about removing locales from the stages entirely, but just reducing the pre-compiled locales that are duplicated. /usr/lib{,64}/locale/locale-archive contains a pre-compile set of locale data for a host. It is NOT the only copy of the data, merely a pre-compiled set for faster lookup. See bug 187658 for background as to the performance boost. The install instructions do already contain details on how to configure it for a given system [2]. If the file is not present, glibc behaves fine, and just takes a much longer lookup path. Over time, the default locales have grown, but with glibc-2.28, Unicode tables were updated, and it jumped from 126MiB to 206MiB [1]. This file has been the largest file in stage tarballs for a long time, except for period in 2014 where it was omitted by default. As of 2019/05/23 stages, where the file is 210MiB, this shrinks the unpacked stage from 1.4GiB to 1.2GiB. The compressed stage3 tarballs also drop in size, saving of ~49MiB for bzip2 (out of 415MiB), and 7MiB for xz (out of 261MiB). [1] https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Release/2.28#The_locale-archive_file_is_much_bigger [2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Configure_locales
I'd be happy to see less locales generated on a stage build, as on slower, fewer-core CPUs this can take a long time (specifically arm32 here). I'd mooted a reduced set a few times, and I believe dilfridge had tweaked the glibc build to possibly default to a C locale? I believe a couple of options had been kicked around the -releng IRC channel, but nothing concrete decided. There was a suggested to adopt an /etc/locale.gen file similar to Debians (for instance, in Gentoo there is no en_GB.UTF-8 locale mentioned) but if this is likely to have exploded, that is possibly not helpful.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/catalyst.git/commit/?id=5fb710093c0d4643b981db7763f7f14d04e02d79 commit 5fb710093c0d4643b981db7763f7f14d04e02d79 Author: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2020-03-27 23:34:19 +0000 Commit: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2020-04-07 23:23:07 +0000 targets: Reduce locales to C.UTF8 in stage builds By default, glibc generates around 500 locales with more added each year. With USE=-compile-locales, glibc generates the locale archive in pkg_postinst(). Since files generated in pkg_postinst() are not recorded in the vdb, this has the advantage of allowing users to freely change the set of enabled locales (by editing /etc/locale.gen and running locale-gen). Since it is so easy for the user to generate any locales they want with locale-gen (and they probably would have anyway to rid themselves of the 499 locales they don't want!), just disable all locales except for C.UTF8 and save stage builders a lot of time. The patch works by (1) Writing /etc/locale.gen with "C.UTF8 UTF-8" (2) Setting CONFIG_PROTECT so glibc doesn't overwrite /etc/locale.gen (3) Running etc-update to reset /etc/locale.gen In order to do this I modified scripts/bootstrap.sh in commit 0aa49828ae25 (scripts/bootstrap.sh: Allow CONFIG_PROTECT). Reducing the set of locales cuts the user time (as reported by time(1)) of the stage2 and stage3 builds as well as the file size of the resulting xz'd tarballs: stage 2 stage 3 size time size time before 89M 22m42s 206M 45m5s after 77M 4m29s 195M 26m8s An alternative solution would be to set USE=compiled-locales for glibc, but that has the downside of being non-default and likely causing users to unnecessarily rebuild glibc. (We'll do this for the ISOs where we want all the locales) Note that this patch does not change the contents of /etc/locale.gen in the stage3 tarball. Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/686862 Signed-off-by: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> targets/stage1/chroot.sh | 1 + targets/stage2/chroot.sh | 6 ++++++ targets/stage3/chroot.sh | 7 +++++++ targets/support/chroot-functions.sh | 6 +++++- 4 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
