From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: After an installation in which only a few languages are installed, upgrading packages such as glibc-common will take up a lot of additional space because neither rpm -U nor up2date will take the install-time language selection into account to limit the language-specific files that are installed. It would be nice if anaconda would create an RPM macros file with an %_install_langs line containing the same definition used at install time. Similarly, anaconda should pick it up when requested to upgrade a system that had such a setting.
We're actually considering just dropping the use of %_install_langs for future releases...
We're not setting %_install_langs anymore as an experiment, especially with the questions coming up now about how to add the .mo files later (which requires basically reinstalling every package on your system. ick)
I wonder if there is a way to re-enable this feature. I noticed that, if I choose a few relevant languages for me in the rpm _install_langs macro and reinstall all packages, I save a significant amount of disk space. It would be nice if there was some way I could arrange for the installer to do what I want, in a kickstart %pre command. Is there?
I tried adding this to %pre, but it doesn't seem to have affected in any way an install of a current tree: echo '# added by kickstart pre scripts' >> /etc/rpm/macros echo '%_install_langs en_US:pt_BR:en:pt' >> /etc/rpm/macros I noticed that /etc/rpm/macros didn't make it to the installed tree, so I wasn't sure it affected anything. Then I tried this: echo '# added by kickstart pre scripts' >> /etc/rpm/macros echo '%_install_langs en_US:pt_BR:en:pt' >> /etc/rpm/macros (until test -d /mnt/sysimage/etc/rpm; do sleep 1; done && cp /etc/rpm/macros /mnt/sysimage/etc/rpm &) Now it made it to the install tree, but still, no difference in the total install size. I ended up adding the definition of _install_langs to ~root/.rpmmacros, and reinstalled all packages, and still no difference! I guess the current tree just isn't amenable to the kind of space savings I used to observe a whiel ago. Time to bump up the size of the root logical volume... :-) Or am I missing something else, like a change in the macro name, or some overrider elsewhere?
Now that we don't set %_install_langs at install time, carrying it through to the installed system isn't really relevant.