[RFC] apt-localepurge - automagically removing unnecessary locale files

[Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.Uni-Mainz.de>]

This is just a simple script to recover diskspace wasted for unneeded
locale files. It will automagically be invoked upon completion of any
apt installation run.  It uses the dpkg "Post-Invoke" function to
execute the script "/usr/sbin/apt-localepurge", which automagically
deletes the LC_MESSAGES subdir of every single locale as defined in
"/etc/locale.purge".  You have to manually uncomment (or add) the
locale directory names you want to be regularily cleaned after each
apt installation run in this configuration file.

I mainly wrote it because in the age multi dozen GByte disks we still
only have very little disk space resources available on our machines
and we just can't spend any money for bigger disks.

Since mostly nobody is ever likely to be in need of every possible
locale on a given machine, i wonder whether it would be worthwhile to
upload this small package.  Maybe interested people might want take a
look and make an informed judgement about possible enhancements?

Binary and sources are temporarily available in a first version here:

ftp://ntama.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian/unofficial/binary/apt-localepurge_0.0.1_all.deb
ftp://ntama.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian/unofficial/source/apt-localepurge_0.0.1.dsc
ftp://ntama.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian/unofficial/source/apt-localepurge_0.0.1.tar.gz

The equivalent apt sources.list entry is:

      deb ftp://ntama.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian unofficial/
      deb-src ftp://ntama.uni-mainz.de/pub/debian unofficial/

In a similar vain and in a different package, the same mechanism could
probably be used to remove unneeded documentation directories or
whatever might be considered superfluous by a competent sysadmin.
This might probably be useful e.g. in a NFS based environment.

                                    Cheers, P. *8^)
-- 
   ------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de> -------------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------