Re: library for unicode collation in C for texi2any?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2023 07:31:29 +0000 (UTC)
> Cc: pertusus@free.fr, bug-texinfo@gnu.org
> From: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>
> 
> 
> >> OK, no tailoring.  I wasn't aware of those differences, thanks for
> >> pointing me to it.
> >> 
> >> Hopefully, we agree that `@documentlanguage` should set a
> >> language-specific collation for the index.
> > 
> > Without tailoring, this basically means collation according to
> > Unicode codepoints.
> 
> Uh oh, this is not good.  As an example, consider the letter 'ä'.
> There are two possible collations that are considered as correct for
> German:
> 
> * Sort 'ä' right before 'b'.
> 
> * Handle 'ä' similar to 'ae' but sort it after 'ae'.
> 
> Neither collation corresponds to Unicode codepoints.

That's exactly what we should not do.  People who read German don't
necessarily live in Germany, and Texinfo is not a general-purpose
system for typesetting documents, it is a system for writing software
documentation.  Besides, which German are you talking about?  There
are several German-based locales, each one with its own local
tailoring.  So consistency in Texinfo is IMNSHO more important that
fine-tuning the order to a specific locale and language.