Bug 336136 – packages do not respect LINGUAS

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Robert Bradbury 2010-09-05 21:55:04 UTC]

While the internationalization of Linux is fine and good there does not appear to be a way to "de-internationalize" typical installations.  Yes, one can build packages -nls, but there are still a large number of files in a typical install (starting with /usr/share subdirectories) but ranging to fonts, keyboards, etc. which users may have no use for.  Retaining and maintaining those in the long run makes Linux installations larger and more costly to maintain than they need to be.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install a reasonable base system;
2. Expand the system over time (many package installs over a couple of years);
3. Perform a detailed examination of where space is being used on / or /usr file systems esp. with respect to files which do not have recent access times.  Or worse yet might have recent access times but are clearly never needed (e.g. fonts for languages one cannot read, keyboards one doesn't own, error message tables you will never read, etc.)

Actual Results:  
There are a lot of files that I can remove with no negative impact on my system.

Expected Results:  
Gentoo should provide "semi-automated" means to tune a system for a user's actual use requirements.

Over time as packages are accumulated system disk usage may grow -- resulting in maintenance issues that involve shifting entire directories to alternate drives and sym-links or the need to even dump and completely reformat a partition using a less space wasteful file systems.  It would be highly desirable for the Gentoo environment to make attempts to mitigate these problems for long term Gentoo users by easily allowing users to purge never needed package sub-elements.

[Comment 1 Mauricio L. Pilla (RETIRED) 2010-09-05 22:10:20 UTC]

Reassigning to bug-wranglers, as it is not an issue with the forums and I don't have the slightest idea to whom should get such a broad request.

[Comment 2 Michał Górny 2010-09-11 14:23:40 UTC]

Please post your ideas to gentoo-dev ML to get some feedback. And please be a little more precise. I don't really see how fonts could be related to the topic (unless you expect us to mangle them and remove non-english characters).

[Comment 3 Robert Bradbury 2010-09-15 19:16:19 UTC]

And how does one subscribe to the Gentoo-Dev ML?

Regarding the precision, one needs to investigate how much each package installation expands /usr, esp. /usr/share which on my system is currently taking up 2+ GB of space.  The most obvious removal candidates are the messages which will never be read.

e.g. du /usr/share | grep LC_MESSAGES.  Gentoo allows/enables the installation of MB if not GB of storage which may not be user specific.

[Comment 4 Michael Weber (RETIRED) 2010-09-17 07:35:28 UTC]

Ok, there were some reported bugs and i personally try to get LINGUAS working on my packages.

You can subscribe by sending a email with your sender address to [e-mail].

[Comment 5 Mart Raudsepp 2010-09-21 15:06:46 UTC]

tl;dr
But see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml and set your LINGUAS variable as instructed. app-admin/localepurge to get rid of prior installed translation files for languages you don't care about. But LINGUAS will take care of shrinking certain files that contain all translations in one file too, such as .desktop files and so on, in future upgrades.

[Comment 6 Panagiotis Christopoulos (RETIRED) 2010-09-21 15:39:30 UTC]

Hi Robert,

   Gentoo started to support localization(de-internationalization, as you would say) techniques even from the time it started as a distribution. In 2003(if I'm not wrong) we added LINGUAS support. Some years ago many packages still didn't respect LINGUAS, but nowadays things are far better. I will resolve this bug as duplicate of the very old one bug #111899 *. For history, you could read: 

http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Installers.html#Installers
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/66558
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/44717
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/35705/

before opening a discussion in gentoo-dev mailing list. Our full documentation for mailing lists is here:

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml

Thank you for your report.

*as it is upstreams problem if their packages do not respect the $LINGUAS variable (the old bug is resolved cantfix, which is true, even in our days)

**see Mart's reply for how to fix your system to get rid of old files

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 111899 ***

[Comment 7 Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2010-09-21 15:43:55 UTC]

(In reply to comment #3)
> And how does one subscribe to the Gentoo-Dev ML?

Pffft.

> e.g. du /usr/share | grep LC_MESSAGES.  Gentoo allows/enables the installation
> of MB if not GB of storage which may not be user specific.

As is the norm in all our distribution efforts of all the different packages, most packages that ignore LINGUAS should get patches sent upstream - or it's up to the scrutiny of package maintainers to decide whether handling LINGUAS is plausible.

Also, there is no use for a tracker here. We're not trying to root out packages that disrespect LINGUAS since that would entail converting all the UPSTREAMs that currently don't, which is an undertaking that would probably require all distros to join in. That isn't plausible right now.