Search functionality: recognize names without correct accents

[clytaemnestra]

Search functionality: recognize names without correct accents

[rixx]

Accent-insensitive search isn't trivial, I'm afraid. I'd love to have it in pretalx, but since pretalx currently supports multiple databases, and each database uses its own collation features, anybody implementing this will have to:

• Document the proper mariadb configuration, which then should immediately work with our __icontains filter
• For postgres, we'd need to use the unaccent lookup, which also requires django.contrib.postgres in our INSTALLED_APPS, so we'd need two further places where code needs to do different things based on the database in use: the settings.py and then the search, which will need to use __unaccent__icontains when postgres is in use, and __icontains otherwise
• For SQLite, … we'd probably need to create the collation, similar to what Adam does here (only with sqlite and its create collation, and then also use that collation.

Frankly, I'm not sure it's worth the maintenance effort at this point. I'd also prefer to have accent insensitive search, but maintaining two janky solutions, plus docs support for the less janky one (on the Django side, at least) sounds like a huge hassle. If anybody wants to step in and contribute, including tests, I'd be willing to talk about it, but until then, I'll close this as "not planned" (pending better Django support or outside contributions).