Locales

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

In current ‘master’, libc builds all the available locales and carries
them with itself (~110 MiB.)

In ‘core-updates’ commit 97e1120, I changed libc to build and install
zero locales.  Instead, locale definitions that users may want must be
specified in the ‘operating-system’ declaration, in a new
‘locale-definitions’ field (see commit 598e19d in ‘master’.)  Locale
data is then available in /run/current-system/locale (and people can
also use $LOCPATH if needed.)

I’ve already noticed that gawk had test failures in the absence of UTF-8
locales, so commit e9bab1d works around it by explicitly invoking
‘localedef’.  Hopefully such problems will be quite rare and can be
worked around similarly, on a case by case basis.  If it turns out to be
not-so-rare, we can add a helper package that contains locale data, or a
helper procedure somewhere.

Comments welcome!

Ludo’.