Locales are not removed on uninstalling a language

[Sworddragon]

I'm using Ubuntu 15.04 with locales 2.13+git20120306-19 and if I'm removing a language the locales aren't removed from /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive while "locale -a" doesn't list them anymore.

[Christian Decker (decker-christian)]

Hello,

how did you verified that locale-archive has removed the language? I can not really read something in the file.

Greets

[Sworddragon (sworddragon)]

I have verified it based on the filesize. With only "language-pack-gnome-de" installed and executing "locale-gen --purge" the file have a size of 3 MiB. Additionally installing language-pack-gnome-fr and executing "locale-gen --purge" causes it to have a size of 4.2 MiB. But removing language-pack-gnome-fr (with the command "apt-get autoremove --purge language-pack-gnome-fr") causes it to still have a size of 4.2 MiB while "locale -a" does not list the locales of language-pack-gnome-fr. Executing "locale-gen --purge" in this state causes the file to be cleaned by having a size of 3 MiB again.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

If it's not included when running "locale -a", it's not there in any practical sense. Your observation with respect to file size is probably due to the locale-archive file type.

[Sworddragon (sworddragon)]

Does that mean that /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive does work similar to a database and marks the entries just as deleted while actually keeping the data?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I think so. But to be perfectly honest I'm not sure. All I know is that the generated locale is no longer available to the system, since it's not listed via the "locale -a" command.

[Sworddragon (sworddragon)]

Maybe it could be then a wishlist request as in case the database theory is true I would otherwise create a feature request to have something like sqlite's VACUUM command to clean up the database from obsolete data.