To understand the packaging of language support related components in Oracle Solaris 11, you must be familiar with the concept of locale facets.
In earlier releases of Oracle Solaris, optional components such as documentation, localization, or debug files were split into separate packages. The Image Packaging System (IPS) in Oracle Solaris 11 enables Oracle Solaris to keep the optional components in the same package by using special tags called facets. Facets make the packaging simpler, while keeping disk space usage low if you do not need the additional features. For more information about facets, see Package Facets and Variants in Adding and Updating Software in Oracle Solaris 11.3 and Chapter 5, Allowing Variations in Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.3.
The locale facets are used to mark files or actions that are language or locale specific. For example, in the manifest of the web/wget package, the file /usr/share/locale/ja/LC_MESSAGES/wget.mo is tagged with locale.ja=true. This tag indicates that the file, which contains Japanese translations of the wget messages, will be installed only when support for Japanese is enabled by setting the locale.ja facet to true.
There is no fixed format for the locale facets. The following convention is used in the Oracle Solaris IPS repositories:
locale.{language}[_territory]
language is a two-letter language code from the ISO 639 standard, and territory is a two-letter territory code from ISO 3166.
For example, locale.fr is used to select files common for all French locales, and locale.fr_FR is used to select files specific to French in France.