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
• gh-130567: Remove optimistic allocation in locale.strxfrm() #137143
• gh-130567: Fix locale.strxfrm() failure on FreeBSD #138608
• gh-130567: Fix crash in locale.strxfrm() on macOS #138615
• gh-130567: Enable previously skipped locale tests on FreeBSD and macOS #138652
• gh-130567: Fix possible crash in locale.strxfrm() #138940
• [3.14] gh-130567: Fix possible crash in locale.strxfrm() (GH-138940) #139265
• [3.13] gh-130567: Fix possible crash in locale.strxfrm() (GH-138940) #139266
• [3.14] gh-130567: Enable previously skipped locale tests on FreeBSD and macOS (GH-138652) #139421
• [3.13] gh-130567: Enable previously skipped locale tests on FreeBSD and macOS (GH-138652) #139422