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

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