bug#34480: [PATCH 0/2] Ensure Guix always has 'glibc-utf8-locales'

[Ludovic Courtès]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 11:17:15PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>>> Hello Guix,
>>> 
>>> After hearing about so many bad first impressions due to missing locales,
>>> I decided to bite the bullet.  I still don’t consider the approach
>>> really satisfying, in particular due to the arbitrary locale selection
>>> in ‘glibc-utf8-locales’, but the benefits are worth it IMO (I feel like
>>> I’ve been too obtuse on this topic, and I’m sorry about that!).
>>
>> Okay, I think it's the right thing to do. We are constantly having to
>> explain the locales warning on IRC.
>
> This ensures that Guix itself works without these warnings.  It doesn’t
> have an effect on installed applications, though, does it?  (That’s fine.)

No it doesn’t; users still have to install ‘glibc-utf8-locales’ or
‘glibc-locales’ and set GUIX_LOCPATH for those.

However it occurred to me that warnings by Guix itself were the most
pressing issue: that’s basically the first message Guix would print.

>>> The closure size of the ‘guix’ package increases like this:
>>> 
>>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>>> $ guix size guix | tail -1
>>> total: 354.2 MiB
>>> $ guix size guix glibc-utf8-locales | tail -1
>>> total: 368.0 MiB
>>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>>> 
>>> That’s a 4% increase, not that bad.
>>
>> It's worth it.
>
> I agree.
>
> Thank you, Ludo, for reconsidering and implementing this!

Done!

  ba48895899 self: Bundle 'glibc-utf8-locales'.
  8a973abc6f gnu: guix: Embed 'glibc-utf8-locales'.

Thank you,
Ludo’.