<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
         xml:id="locales">
 <title>Locales</title>

 <para>
  To allow simultaneous use of packages linked against different versions of <literal>glibc</literal> with different locale archive formats Nixpkgs patches <literal>glibc</literal> to rely on <literal>LOCALE_ARCHIVE</literal> environment variable.
 </para>

 <para>
  On non-NixOS distributions this variable is obviously not set. This can cause regressions in language support or even crashes in some Nixpkgs-provided programs. The simplest way to mitigate this problem is exporting the <literal>LOCALE_ARCHIVE</literal> variable pointing to <literal>${glibcLocales}/lib/locale/locale-archive</literal>. The drawback (and the reason this is not the default) is the relatively large (a hundred MiB) size of the full set of locales. It is possible to build a custom set of locales by overriding parameters <literal>allLocales</literal> and <literal>locales</literal> of the package.
 </para>
</section>
