Re: Locale for boot-floppies

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org>]

Marcin Owsiany <porridge@pandora.info.bielsko.pl>:

> Now that we decided to use glibc's UTF-8 support in
> boot-floppies, we need a locale definition to use on the root
> disk.
> 
> C.UTF-8 doesn't exist in /etc/locale.gen. en_IN.UTF-8 which
> I chose semi-randomly for my own builds is 480 kb, which is
> _way_ to big for the root disk.

Probably we should create a new minimal locale which is just like C,
except that it uses UTF-8. Maybe we can call it "C.UTF-8".

I'm not an export on locales, but I'll try to have a look at it and
see if I can make something work.

I'll take a wild guess that a lot of the kilobytes are used up by the
data needed for collating. If you look at some of the bug reports for
libc6 and locales you'll see that the sophisticated collating that
glibc now does is rather unpopular with many users. Many people prefer
to use LC_COLLATE=C. So that's one way we can make C.UTF-8 smaller.

Edmund