musl locales and collation support

This is a tracking issue for the coordination required for testing and providing design feedback for missing features in locale and collation (ordering problems, so pmaports#1446) support in musl. Together with Rich, we will look for some funding, and we hope that the work starts around the beginning of 2025.

We will need community input from people with experience running devices in their native non-English language. We will need these people to provide testing feedback, as well as feedback to include within design decisions. For testing, we hope to provide easy installation instructions (e.g: using mrtest) for people to test in their systems. Ideally, we will be able to gather a varied team with experience in languages from all the continents and a variety of characters and writing uses. I estimate the testing time to not exceed the 20 hours per person through a couple of months. If funding is granted, there is a possibility we can people for their testing, but given the limited time, that will possibly not exceed the 500 EUR per person. This is of course not warrantied.

Requirements to be able to join the effort:

  • Be a regular user of a non-English language in your device(s). Ideally you'd have lots of files with special characters of such language in your hard-drive
  • Be able to use mrtest
  • Availability for testing (max. around 20 hours, possibly less) in the first semester of 2025

Current team available around the beginning of 2025:

Edited by Pablo Correa Gomez