Bug#1005193: libc6: please split away gconv files
Hi,
On 2025-02-26 10:12, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 08, 2022 at 08:28:03PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > The bulk of libc6 package consists of gconv files for obsolete locales.
> > This costs us 8.2MB per arch, even for minimal containers.
>
> Indeed, gconv files are >10% of minimal containers right now:
> $ podman run -it --rm debian:unstable-slim
> root@5afbafb696c0:/# du -hs --one-file-system /
> 81M /
> root@5afbafb696c0:/# du -hs --one-file-system /usr/lib/*/gconv
> 8.2M /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gconv
>
> > Fedora has done so, then lowered the dependency to Recommends last year:
> > https://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Gconv_package_split_in_glibc
> > They've decided to keep a handful of often used old locales, which is
> > probably reasonable.
>
> Specifically, this is the relevant fragment from the Fedora package with
> the regexp that matches which locales to keep in the main glibc package:
> # The primary gconv converters are in the glibc package, the rest goes
> # into glibc-gconv-extra. The Z9 and Z900 subpatterns are for
> # s390x-specific converters. The -name clause skips over files
> # that are not loadable gconv modules.
> split_sysroot_file_list \
> %{_libdir}/gconv '-name *.so' \
> 'gconv/
> (CP1252
> |ISO8859-15?
> |UNICODE
> |UTF-[0-9]+
> |ISO-8859-1_CP037_Z900
> |UTF(8|16)_UTF(16|32)_Z9
> )\.so$' \
> gconv-extra.filelist glibc.filelist
>
> Source:
> https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/glibc/blob/rawhide/f/glibc.spec#_1896
>
> > Thus: could you please move the gconv files to a new package; with a
> > hard dependency from libc6 for now?
Thanks for the pointer, that make things easier.
> Agreed! Shipping ancient DOS codepages and EBCDIC to every Debian system
> in 2025 feels just wasteful to me :)
>
> It's great that Fedora has already paved the way here and did most of
> the hard work! I don't know how your appetite is in doing this for
> trixie, but I'd personally love to see this happen.
That looks almost impossible for trixie, the freeze is in 2 weeks, and
it has to go through NEW...
Regards
Aurelien
--
Aurelien Jarno GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien@aurel32.net http://aurel32.net
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