Search with diacritics / accents characters with `locate` command

Sometimes I need to search files with accented characters (diacritic in general), usually with locate (mlocate flavor, Merging Locate; see below the warning related to plocate). I wish to setup (maybe in /etc/updatedb.conf) so it let me search for this special characters using a certain language mapping, for example:

a == âàáäÂÀÂÄe == êèéëÊÈÉËi == îïíÎÏo == ôöóÔÖu == ûùüÛÜÙc == çÇn == ñ

So locate -i liberación also should search for file names with string liberacion and even liberaciòn.

Notes and assumptions

• And maybe others: ÂÃÄÀÁÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ.
• This is a common situation on romance languages like Spanish, French, and German.
• I'm always using a locale 100% UTF-8.
• I would rather not have to use regular expressions.
• A patch might use ASCII transliterations of Unicode as Unidecode/cUnidecode does. Most of mlocate is written on C.

Related

• Similar question but using find
• Miloslav Trmač (mlocate developer) say here that the official source code is on pagure.io (and a fork on Github).
• I file an issue on mlocate repo at Pagure.io to add this feature.
  • Update 2018-02: This can be fixed with this pull request by marcotrevisan. Will add a -t/--transliterate support using iconv to match accented.
  • Update 2018-03: mlocate with support for --transliterate is now included in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver (v2 and v3.1).