Bug#185010: localedef uses lots and lots of memory

[pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk]

Package: libc6
Version: 2.2.5-11.2

The localedef utility (as run by locale-gen) uses an extremely large amount
of memory. This means it takes a very long time to run on machines without
very much RAM (48MB in this case), and my SPARCstation actually ran totally
out of memory so localedef was killed by the OOM-killer before it could 
finish...

Here's a ps snapshot:
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     18243  6.9 34.5 41852 13992 pts/7   D    13:41   0:39 localedef -i en_GB -c -f UTF-8 en_GB.UTF-8

Note the ludicrous VSZ.

(I dunno, maybe this should be wishlist, but since it's actually bad
enough that I can't add extra locales on this SPARC box I'll leave it
at normal severity.)

-- PMM