Re: Locales and belocs-locales-data, some explanations

[Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org>]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 01:48:14AM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
>   * By default, locales are written into the old format (not into an
>     archive file).  My motivation was that if someone needs to add a
>     local locale, she can compile her locale into $HOME/share/locale
>     and set LOCPATH to $HOME/share/locale:/usr/lib/locale if she
>     wants to use either her preferred locale or a system one, e.g.
>     with LANGUAGE=xx_XX:de
>     But this will work only if system locales are compiled in old
>     style, not with archive.  I also made benchmarks to see if
>     archive was faster, and IIRC noticed no significant difference.
>     This behavior can be overridden by the --archive flag.

Bruno Haible wrote in
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/locale-list/2005-August/msg00014.html
<quote>
  Similarly, he has put all the locale data files into a single big
  archive, to reduce the number of open() calls at program startup.
</quote>

On Red Hat, locales are compiled into both old and new formats,
certainly to take advantage of both sides.

Denis