@ glibc so-libs

At least if you use alienbob's multi lib, you will be missing all the locales, character maps, and zoneinfo

You may want to consider an ancillary package that adds your language... that is if you want to get rid of some warning messages that some programs my display on load. Or if you want to make your system 'complete' and 'minimal'

Somewhere along the way, PatV started using en_US as the default locale (in /etc/profile[.d] stuff) which makes it pretty mandatory to have at least that installed from glibc-i18n, even for a console-only box. As mentioned, trying to use X without locale support will also be a problem.

Shouldn't be too hard to write a script that extracts them directly from one archive and places them in another...

You are right, lumak. My build script already contains the 'hard part' of the code for separating the locales. One 'trick' I implemented was to create individual slack-desc files for each locale which give detailed info about the locale (what country it is used in, etc). On the way there, I wound up creating a CSV list of all the locales with such details. Because of differences in the format of locale files, I had to hand-correct a few entries for accuracy.
Still, using localepurge after installing all the packages will do a more complete job since it removes unwanted locale/man-pages for all installed packages.