Re: [musl] Locale support considered harmful noise

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 09:28:10PM +0000, Jacob Welsh wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, A. Wilcox wrote:
> 
> >Why do you not believe that musl could provide any of these features
> >using clear and concise code?
> 
> I fully expect it could. The point at issue however is whether it
> should be done at all.
> 
> >I have been personally impacted by the lack of LC_COLLATE support.
> 
> I have been personally "impacted" by its presence in glibc, but
> perhaps I'm not the sort of "real world" user whose needs you would
> like to represent.

You avoid this by not setting LANG, LC_COLLATE, or LC_ALL in your
environment, or by ensuring that the one that takes precedence yields
a result of C or C.UTF-8 for the LC_COLLATE category. Plenty of users,
myself included, prefer codepoint order for directory listings and
such. This does not conflict in any way with providing support for
other collation orders that are useful for things like sorting
natural-language CSV tables, etc.

> >In fact, musl is *not* conformant to the POSIX standard *because*
> >it does not implement the requisite locale support.
> 
> We're prepared to fork POSIX or any other document that proves
> necessary. Not like it's hard.

No comment.

Rich