It would be nice to be able to add sort-order tags, so that (for
example) "The Beatles" can be tagged using "id3v2 --TSOP Beatles"
and so be sorted with other "B" artists, but have their full name
displayed.

The workaround for my example is to drop the "The" from the artist
name, but this doesn't work for sorting by surname.  I detest "Surname,
Forename" notation!

tags 104089 +wontfix
thanks

The requested sort-order frames (TSOP, TSOA, TSOT) are ID3v2.4 frames.
id3v2 is a thin front-end over id3lib, which only writes ID3 v2.3.0 and
is no longer maintained upstream. Although id3lib defines the enum
constants for these frames, it has no entries for them in its internal
frame-definition table, so it cannot create or render them; supporting
them would require patching id3lib itself (adding 2.4 frames to a
2.3-only library) in addition to id3v2, with the semantic caveat that
the result would be 2.4 frames written into a 2.3 tag.

Users who need sort-order tags (and ID3v2.4 in general) should use
mid3v2(1) from the mutagen project, which supports these frames
natively. The id3v2 manual page now points to mid3v2 as the actively
maintained alternative for exactly this kind of functionality.

Tagging this wontfix.

Martin