USE_LANGUAGES=en es ja

wdreinhart · Guru Joined: 11 Jun 2003 Posts: 569 Location: 4QFJ12345678

Most Linux desktop apps have translations for many different languages. By default all of them are installed. I quick look in /usr/share/locale shows that I have 180 MBytes of localized strings in over 100 languages. Of that, only 3 languages occupying 17 MBytes of disk space contain strings I can read. IMHO, this runs counter to the Gentoo way of doing things. If I don't want to use KDE, I can build most apps without KDE support. If I can't read Korean, I still get all the Korean strings for every app that has a Korean translation. Is there any way to limit the locales installed to ones I have a hope of understanding? Would it break anything if I just deleted 90+ locales?

Rav70 · l33t Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 607 Location: Poland

emerge localepurge. It's quite a good utility to get rid of unwanted locales.
Regards,
Rav
_________________
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Rainbow goblin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Feb 2004 Posts: 132

From http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml
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The userlocales USE flag

You will probably only use one or maybe two locales on your system. Up until now after compiling glibc a full set of all available locales has been created. As of now you can activate the userlocales USE flag und specify only the locales you will need in /etc/locales.build.

Code Listing 3.4: Activate the userlocales USE flag especially for glibc

echo "sys-libs/glibc userlocales" >> /etc/portage/package.use

Now specify the locales you want to be able to use:

Code Listing 3.5: nano -w /etc/locales.build

en_US/ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8
de_DE/ISO-8859-1
de_DE@euro/ISO-8859-15

The next step is to re-compile glibc. Of course you can defer this until the next glibc upgrade is available.

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spaetz · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2003 Posts: 16

userlocales is for glibc. Fine. What about the gazillion of other packages? I have found no way yet to restrict the building, but to run localepurge afterwards.

Flammie · Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 5:14 pm Post subject:

Theoretically setting LINGUAS="foo bar baz" will only produce .mo-files of foo bar and baz languages, for all nls'd programs that use default autotoolset and gettext way of doing things... or was it some variable other than LINGUAS? Anyways, just use localepurge to be sure.