Each time I install or operate in other means l10n-related packages, the APT system rebuilds a lot of English locales, which takes considerable time. Look at the APT log:Configuring language-pack-en-base (1:10.10+20100930) ...Generating locales...  en_AG.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_AU.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_BW.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_CA.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_DK.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_GB.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_HK.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_IE.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_IN.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_NG.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_NZ.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_PH.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_SG.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_ZA.UTF-8... up-to-date  en_ZW.UTF-8... up-to-dateGeneration complete.And this happens for each package.I don't need all those variants - most of the time I use non-English locale altogether. For me en_US and en_GB would be sufficient.So my questions are:Are all those en_* variants really installed on my machine? How to check that?If they are, how to cleanly remove them and prevent APT from generating them?
How to control the list of locales which are generated by APT?
apt;locale
The extent to which the en_* locales actually take up space on your system really depends on the packages you have installed.  In general, locale data is stored in /usr/lib/locale.The last time I checked, changing the locales that are generated was a bit Distro specific.In Debian:# dpkg-reconfigure localesIn Ubuntu:Edit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/en and /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local to only include those locales you want.Run # dpkg-reconfigure localesIf you want to reclaim the space used by some of those other locales, you can try the localepurge package in Debian or Ubuntu; however, as the man page warns, it can sometimes cause problems.