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.)
