lvm and locales memory issue

[Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com>]

On 22.2.2010 19:23, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 06:11:50PM +0000, Alasdair G Kergon wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 02:16:38PM +0100, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
>>> On 22.2.2010 11:55, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
>>>> 'rm -f /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive'
>>>> 'localedef -f UTF-8 -i cs_CZ /usr/lib/locale/cs_CZ.utf8'
>>>> 'localedef -i cs_CZ -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias cs_CZ.UTF-8'
>>
>> %attr(0644,root,root) %verify(not md5 size mtime mode) %ghost %config(missingok,noreplace) %{_prefix}/lib/locale/locale-archive
>>
>> So removing/changing that file is a fully-supported process?
> 
> Of course not.  The reason it has these flags is for glibc upgrading
> purposes.  glibc-common rpm ships with locale-archive.tmpl file, and %post
> merges all locales from that file with any possible user added locales in
> locale-archive into a new locale-archive, the *.tmpl file is then deleted.
> 
>> Perhaps anaconda should automatically remove it (if it has not been customised) on
>> any system with < 640MB RAM?
> 
> If you delete the file, you loose all localization, because we don't ship
> the individual /usr/lib/locale/*_*/* locale files for space reasons.
> The same effect as if you don't call setlocale at all, or just with "C" in
> all apps.
> 


Ok - and now I'm getting confused and lost here.

>From our chat I've got impression that using 'localedef' is perfectly valid
way how to create usable content for /usr/lib/locale.

On my Fedora Rawhide system I've /usr/share/i18n/locales 6MB and
/usr/share/locale/cs 12MB, that contains amongst other things 128KB libc.mo
file and a lot of other files.

>From my simple test program I do get valid Czech locale error messages and
properly localized strftime() output from glibc calls in the case I recreate
/usr/lib/local/locale-archive with 'localedef' command above.

So what is the purpose of /usr/share/i18n/local, /usr/share/locale in this case?

What do I miss in case the local-archive.tmpl file is not in used?

Is the Czech locale special and there are some some other locales which could
not be easily recreated?

(btw it takes 1.3sec to create 1 Czech locale-archive, thus it looks like for
200 locales it could take maybe 4minutes in case of complete full recreate of
the locale-archive file)

It seems to me that my glibc-commons contains all files needed to create
usable locale-archive even without locale-archive.tmpl - am I missing
something here?

>From strace it looks like only the content of /usr/share/i18n/locales does
matter and it translates files in string form to binary form.
Files from /usr/share/locale are opened runtime when needed by application.

Thus I'm quite curios why the file  /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive is actually
opened for the case that only  LC_MESSAGES is set to some locales.
IMHO for this only files form /usr/share/locale should matter -  I could
assume it's because of the aliasing handling which is also hidden inside
cached binary files - but it's pretty overkill isn't?

Zdenek