Enable Ascii folding when searching for names with special characters
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Release notes
Users can now search for names such as Rémy Coutable (@rymai) and actually find the person they are searching for while not needing to find the special é character but only by typing e.
Problem to solve
Searching for users anywhere in Gitlab does not normalize the letters according to the search best practices. This makes it difficult to find the right user and requires to memorize users with their username instead of their first or lastname.
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Proposal
If the search happens with Elastic Search, use the Asciifolding token filter to normalize these characters so that on index time these characters are indexed as their regular ascii character. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-asciifolding-tokenfilter.html
If the search happens with MySQL, and indexing is in Ruby, one can use ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate to normalize these characters before sending it to MySQL tables.
Intended users
All of the users or unknown - new here, please help me out. I think everybody uses the user search
Feature Usage Metrics
I need some help here to fill this in. I would assume you would need to track the amount of aborted searches that do not convert in an actual name. When this feature is deployed, the amount of conversions that are abandoned should decrease.
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