Gentoo and i18n or how not to compile all languages

Kalin

Hi all!
I am quite a newbie to gentoo, but have much experience with RH.

While installing different ebuilds, I noticed that some programs (like wget) install several languagges by default. For the last hour or so I am googleing the Net about locale, localedef, $LINGUAS and so on, but cannot find a simple answer to my question. Ah, well, which is:

How do I configure my system so that (if there is support) only some languages (bg ja en) be compiled and installed (man pages, other for gettext...) ? Is there such a way, or should I hack every package? In which case I will not.

Kalin.

Maz · Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2002 2:32 pm Post subject:

There is no way to only install some languages.

I think you are looking for package 'localepurge'. Please note that by default it will erase almost all locales, read the man page carefully.
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Maz

Kalin

I couldn't find any more info on the subject and I was away from gentoo for a while...

So now, that I install a new box from stage1, it is a pain in the a.s to build all the locales in glibc, TWICE even.

Anybody thinking of say a LANGS tag in the make.conf, or something similar?

Kalin.

swallowhc · n00b Joined: 17 Nov 2002 Posts: 8 Location: taiwan

Kalin · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 1:46 pm Post subject:

That has nothing to do with my question...

I have nls and cjk in USE flags already, but I dont want Chinese or French for example, no bad feelings, just don't speak those languages.

I was trying with LINGUAS="en ja ru bg de" for example, but could not make it work for wget (for example).

Anybody with more info?

jcosters · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 2:10 pm Post subject:

I am in favour of adding a LANGS variable in make.conf, that seems kinda logical to me.

Kalin

Well, it seems wget is not exactly using the magic of m4, this is what I got from their mailing list:

> At installation time something like this should work:
>
> wget-1.6/po> make install CATALOGS="en.gmo ja.gmo bg.gmo"
>
> The configure trick does not work because wget's configure.in is a little bit non-standard:
> It does not include all of the usual m4/gettext.m4 magic.

BTW, as it seems standard to use $LINGUAS, why not set it in make.conf (and document it).

I tried localepurge pkg but am not quite satisfied with it after it deleted some ja_JP locale although ja was configured not to be purged (ja, not ja_JP, but...). I know it is in alpha and don't blame anybody, just my experience. I amy eventualy rewrite such script from scratch in some time...

That's for now, if anybody is interested in i18n, keepo posting !!!

seemant

portage itself needs to support such a thing, and I have a bug request open about it for a long time.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9988

unfortunately, I know not much about the stuff, so it is only my ideas. input (to the bug report) welcome.

liquidx · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 2:22 pm Post subject:

just to clarify,

USE="cjk" mostly is used to specify patches to console programs to deal with multi-byte characters that are used in those locales. for instance groff, links, etc. or in some cases like the upcoming xfree, is just used to install extra cjk fonts.

if you don't wish to have cjk support, then have it set off, if you don't really care, having cjk set just means a patch is used for your favourite terminal program or whatever to deal with it. it won't install anything specifically extra.

there is also a bug owned by cjk@gentoo.org that requests japanese/chinese/korean useflags. it is something in the pipeline and possibly going to be formulated into a proposal when we identify which packages can actually use it.

Kalin · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 1:32 pm Post subject:

Just to keep the thread alive, here is an bit of my /etc/make.conf file:

xianx · Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2003 3:57 pm Post subject:

Funny, i was searching the forums for just the thing. Too bad there's no clear solution. I am interested in slimming down the languages that are used, How much in anyone's opinion would this improve space requirements/speed or anything like that?

thanks for any info.
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Kalin · Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2003 7:22 am Post subject:

I just got a mail from Hrvoje Niksic (wget developer) witha patch that makes wget use $LINGUAS and $ALL_LINGUAS ! See: http://cvs.sunsite.dk/viewcvs.cgi/wget/aclocal.m4?rev=1.19&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

Another program with "problems" is mplayer... Well, it took me a week to understad that mplayer actually understands $LINGUAS in his way, i.e. the user interface (all messages printed on the console) are in the first language of $LINGUAS and are hard-coded at compile time. It happened to be Bulgarian at that time and I was trying to read it on a japanese terminal... So I had to switch my make.conf (and recompile) to: