Re: [HEADS-UP] BSD sort is the default sort in -CURRENT

From: Doug Barton <dougb_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 02:43:20 -0700
On 06/27/2012 02:09 AM, Oleg Moskalenko wrote:
> Doug, I'll post some performance figures, probably tomorrow.

That's great, thanks.

> But I do not agree with you that we have to reproduce the old sort bugs.
> It makes no sense and I am not going to do that. Absolutely not.

That isn't what I said. What I asked is for you to *test* the existing
sort vs. the new one, and to report where the behavior is different.
That's a very basic part of any sort of "replace a core utility" project
such as this one.

> If some old scripts are relying on buggy behavior 
> (and I hope they are not) then the old scripts must be fixed. Period.

With respect, that's not your decision (or mine for that matter). We
first need the data, then as a project we decide how many old bugs we
want to be compatible with, if any.

> The system cannot grow replicating the old bugs.

And the project cannot grow if we lose users due to gratuitous
differences in core utilities.

> All system scripts that I've seen are using pretty basic sort features.

The system scripts are only a tiny fraction of how FreeBSD users use sort.

> In the basic
> area, the old sort and the new sort are 100% compatible. The incompatibilities are 
> in more complex areas (numeric sorts and unusual key-based sorts).

So here's one to add to your regression test. I use the following to
sort IPv4 addresses in a list:

sort -n -t . -k 1,1 -k 2,2 -k 3,3 -k 4,4

When used with GNU sort that will sort a list of IPv4 addresses into a
humanly-recognizable numeric order. Please ensure that this works the
same way with the new sort.

> I am actually tested the new sort against the old GNU sort. There are some incompatibilities. 
> All of them are due to the bugs of the old GNU sort.

Please list all of those explicitly.

> The new BSD sort program
> is compatible with the new GNU sort, a much cleaner program than the old GNU sort.

That's good, but not really relevant to the users of what we have in the
base now.

I realize that these questions may seem discouraging, but they need to
be answered. It would have been nice if Gabor had posted a "we think
we're ready to make the new sort the default, any last concerns?"
message, but deal with where we are at and move forward.

thanks,

Doug
Received on Wed Jun 27 2012 - 07:43:37 UTC

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