Bug report

Bug description:

It appears that macOS 15 broke locale.strxfrm for letters outside the latin-1 set:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8')
locale.strxfrm('Français') # works
locale.strxfrm('zkouška') # crashes with OSError
locale.strxfrm('中文') # crashes with OSError

This works on Linux and macOS 14 and crashes on macOS 15, tested with Python 3.9–3.14: https://github.com/nijel/python-strxfrm/actions/runs/13541306384/job/37842825809

There are several projects which run into this already:

• Locale aware sorting crashes on macOS 15 with OSError WeblateOrg/weblate#14019
• Nicotine+ crashing when trying to browse public shares (on MacOS 15 Public Beta) nicotine-plus/nicotine-plus#3063
• Zim wont open in macOS Sequoia zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki#2665

In most cases, this is being addressed by completely removing locale-aware sorting.

CPython versions tested on:

3.14

Operating systems tested on:

macOS

Linked PRs

• gh-130567: fix strxfrm memory allocation #130619