I think you can do this, but it is better to make a backup - I think you also can delete /usr/share/locale all languages you do not need for your programs - like here: /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES are all the german translations for your programs

Hi Darjeeling
If you only need en_GB, en_US, French and German locale, you don't need slitaz-i18n and glibc-locale. This languages are present on standard cd image and have separate locale packages. You can remove safely slitaz-i18n and glibc-locale with tazpkg.

Thanks for your replies, Kultex & Gawron. Your hint at glibc-locale put me on the right track. The SliTaz package manager says the glibc-locale installation takes up 22.2 Mb ...

Standard SliTaz 3.0 before glibc-locale installation ...
/usr/lib/gconv ............. 5 files / 123 Kb
/usr/share/i18n/charmaps ... 1 file / 286 Kb
/usr/share/i18n/locales .... 21 files / 602 Kb

Standard SliTaz 3.0 after glibc-locale installation ...
/usr/lib/gconv ............. 248 files / 6.7 Mb
/usr/share/i18n/charmaps ... 227 files / 3.2 Mb
/usr/share/i18n/locales .... 278 files / 6.2 Mb

... and who knows what else. Over the weekend I spent some time trying to figure out which of these files were actually needed. And it was then that I remembered why I had installed glibc-locale in the first place. Earlier this year we all had problems with AbiWord in SliTaz 3.0 ... one could edit a text and safe it e.g. as *.doc or *.odt but on re-opening the file AbiWord would only present a blank page. After [url=http://forum.slitaz.org/index.php/discussion/969/solved-slitaz-abiword-still-broken-will-not-display-content]much tinkering[/url] it was Ernia who came up with a solution to the problem ... glibc-locale! At the time I was happy to get AbiWord working and didn't care about the disproportional amount of space glibc-locale was taking up. But now, on closer inspection, I found that none of the additional files in /usr/share/i18n/ were necessary as they only serve for the localization of applications. But removing the 248 additional files (character maps) in /usr/lib/gconv/ had an immediate effect ... AbiWord was no longer working! In a long drawn out and tedious elimination process I then found that actually only one (!) out of the 248 additional files in /usr/lib/gconv/ was needed to get AbiWord working without having to install glibc-locale ... "CP1252.so".

In order to test this I booted a standard SliTaz 3.0 live CD, installed and upgraded AbiWord and added "CP1252.so" to /usr/lib/gconv/. I then created, saved and re-opened a number of multilingual (en,fr,ge) text files in AbiWord ...

abw .... AbiWord
awt .... AbiWord Template
doc .... Microsoft Word
rtf .... Rich Text Format
docx ... Office Open XML
odt .... OpenDocument
sxw .... OpenOffice Writer

... they all worked without a problem. After installing aspell and the en/fr/ge aspell dictionaries I could switch between the dictionaries and run the AbiWord spell-checker on all of my 7 sample texts, again without a problem.

As it looks, for the use of AbiWord the 22.2 Mb glibc-locale installation can be replaced by a single 9.6 Kb file without any ill-effects. The current cooking version of AbiWord lists glibc-locale as a dependency. Maybe, if someone can confirm what I have found out, glibc-locale can be altogether removed from the AbiWord dependency list and "CP1252.so" can somehow be bundled directly in the AbiWord package?

... oops. How do I do links in this forum?

Well done Darjeeling. This is great. :-)

Thanks for sharing.
Stephane

I'm glad you like it, Totoetsasoeur. But I think I've created a bit of a muddle with the use of the word "additional" in the text above. After booting the original SliTaz 3.0 CD the folder /usr/lib/gconv/ contains these 5 files ...

ANSI_X3.110.so 21.9 KB 2010-03-07 01:01
gconv-modules 56.0 KB 2009-09-20 01:40
ISO8859-1.so 9.6 KB 2010-03-07 01:01
UNICODE.so 9.6 KB 2010-03-07 01:01
UTF-16.so 9.6 KB 2010-03-07 01:01

... to which the installation of glibc-locale adds another 243 files (248 all in all). In order to get AbiWord to work without installing glibc-locale I'd keep the original 5 files plus ...

CP1252.so 9.6 KB 2010-02-03 01:06

... from the glibc-locale installation. I have tested AbiWord with the above mentioned 7 file formats, each with English, French and German sample texts ... and it worked. But I have no idea if the same is true for Icelandic, Greek, Russian or Asian text documents.