/usr/lib/locale/<locale> and locale-archive should remove before generating locales?

[GOTO Masanori <gotom@debian.or.jp>]

This issue is raised from Bug#166979, and this discussion can cut off
from the original bug:

At Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:38:39 +0900,
GOTO Masanori wrote:
> At Tue, 25 Mar 2003 18:53:45 +0100,
> Denis Barbier wrote:
> > As /usr/lib/locale is managed by the locales package, could it purge
> > old /usr/lib/locale/<locale>/ files?  Those files are now unneeded
> > and confusing for users.  User defined locales should not be deleted
> > but placed in the archive, maybe a postinst script could put
> > /usr/lib/locale/<locale> in locale-archive and remove these files?
> 
> Hmm.  Glibc 2.3.2 still reads both /usr/lib/locale/<locale> and
> /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.  So it can use and it's not
> "unneeded".
> 
> OK, now our discussion can move to old /usr/lib/locale/<locale> and
> old entries in /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.  I write this issue 
> in another mail.

Currently, our locales package do not remove /usr/lib/locale/<locale>
and /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.  Glibc locale system looks both
<locale> dir and locale-archive files to search the current locale's
database.  These locale database can store the generated locales.  So
this means that we can have very old locale entries in these locale
database.  The current locale-archive file accumulates a lot of locale
database which were generated in the past but the current locales'
debconf interface does not have such old entries and they are not
updated.

So the solution is: remove all directories in /usr/lib/locale and
/usr/lib/locale-archive whenever we reconfigure or install or upgrade
locales package in each time.

I think simply removal for old locale entries is the best and the
easiest way.  Any comments?

Regards,
-- gotom