Hi!
Yes it is a technical pain in the arse.The question is
one of primacy. Is it
more important to provide service or are technical considerations of the
most importance. Yes, we discussed this in the past and we did not agree
then and we do not agree now.
Well, I agree that it might be good idea to have language-specific ordering, just costs
are quite high and there're not too many people eager to do engineering part of such
project.
CLDR isn't panacea, it is constantly evolving project, with inaccurate stable versions
(even for well established languages like mine, heheh), and various proposed/testing
versions.
So, to pick CLDR based flow, and do it properly, it would consist of infinite loop of:
1. Understanding which languages need a separate collation
2. Evaluating all available collations for a language, attracting input from local
communities and standardization bodies
3. Evaluating the algorithmic implications of chosen collation - then either approaching
standards bodies to change it, or simplifying it internally (and forking), or implementing
algorithms in software (though that sometimes is impossible to do in efficient way)
4. Porting (3) into a backend of choice
5. Provide upgrade path and conflict resolution method for existing content
6. Provide framework to do full index rebuilds and switchover between different collations
(ok, this probably is one-time engineering project, albeit quite complex, as it has to
have (4) and (5) in mind)
7. Monitor for new versions of collations :)
Multiply all that by number of languages we have, and do note that there're multiple
sorting variants per language too (e.g. dictionary vs phonebook ordering in Germany).
So yes, it would be fantastic to have that kind of functionality, but you'd need quite
some engineering capacity to pull it off.
And if we get to implementation specifics - ordering rules are same as equality rules,
causing quite some confusion in some cases (and some people will definitely want to have
same sorted but not equal terms.. :)
Of course, we can use community driven sortkey hacks for some features ;-)
I wonder how our English language readers would react
when the sort order
for their lists would be wrong.
I guess it isn't absolutely tragic for others, as otherwise we wouldn't see
projects in other languages at all. Now thats a benchmark! ;-)
Domas