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Currently RPM does not support the flagging of locale trees in builds. Additionally, RPM does not support reading of the selected $LANG to determine what pkg files should or should not be installed. Proposed enhancements include "flagging" SRPM trees as locale specific, and RPM installer respecting the tree and default LANG (plus C/posix). Finally, RPM could "WARN" when the filesets for that locale are unavailable.
I'm not sure what you are asking for. Can you supply a concrete example? Why should an rpm build care about $LANG at all? RPM certainly neither sets nor uses that environment variable during build, leaving it up to the packager to get the environment correct. RPM supports the flagging of language specific locale trees in packages with, for example, %files ... %lang(de) /usr/*/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/foo.* RPM during package install uses the macro %_install_langs (rather than LANG or LC_ALL or ...), to decide what languages should be installed. Using a macro, rather than LANG/LC_ALL (the previous behavior of rpm) was suggested by others more i18n aware than I. (note: the value of the macro is a colon separated list of locales, with special meaning for "all")
Somehow this bug was changed to reported by someone other than myself. However... what I was refering to was not RPM's ability to have an language file... but what I am seeing (unless I have missed something) is the inability to only select the language sets I want. Repeatedly I am deleting or using the exclude path for all files outside of say /usr/*/local/C/LC_MESSAGES etc.. or /usr/*/local/en_US/LC_MESSAGES and so forth. In otherwords... I do not need language files outside of US Enlish... and I have been unable to find in the documentation a way to not install filesets outside of those I need. So... unless I have missed the ability to ONLY install the filesets that match my system or SELECT language sets I want... I still am requesting this ability.
Ooops... missed one note I wanted to add for comments... I understand your comment on leaving it to the developers... but most do not in their pre-install routines ask if you wish to install a given fileset... so I was looking for rpm to understand its own designation for %lang(cc) and query the user for specific language filesets.
Yes, bugzilla dropped some bits, I see you've found your bug. In rpm-3.0.4, if you want, for example, just de and fr, then do something like mkdir -p /etc/rpm echo 'de:fr' >> /etc/rpm/macros before installing/upgrading packages. There are similar mechanisms in earlier versions of rpm. Ping me if you want me to explain, otherwise upgrade to rpm-3.0.4.
Eeek, that should have been ... echo '%_install_langs de:fr' >> /etc/rpm/macros