Here is a thought that occurs to me, as I follow along with Jeff
Davis's evolving proposals for built-in collations and ctypes: What
would stop us from dropping support for the libc (sic) provider on
Windows? That may sound radical and likely to cause extra work for
people on upgrade, but how does that compare to the pain of keeping
this barely maintained code in the tree? Suppose the idea in this
thread goes ahead and we get people to transition to the modern locale
names: there is non-zero transitional/upgrade pain there too. How
delicious it would be to just nuke the whole thing from orbit, and
keep only cross-platform code that is maintained with enthusiasm by
active hackers.
That's probably a little extreme, but it's the direction my thoughts
start to go in when confronting the realisation that it's up to us
[Unix hackers making drive-by changes], no one is coming to help us
[from the Windows user community].
I've even heard others talk about dropping Windows completely, due to
the maintenance imbalance. This would be somewhat more fine grained.
(One could use a similar argument to drop non-NTFS filesystems and
turn on POSIX-mode file links, to end that other locus of struggle.)