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

Daniel Gerzo <danger_at_freebsd.org>:

> On 27.06.2012 10:43, Doug Barton wrote:
>> 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.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> Doug, are you implying that if we were about to import a new version  
> of GNU sort, you would be asking for the same data? I believe we do  
> not make this kind of work with any vendor code that is being  
> updated in the base; I do not really understand why should Oleg or  
> anyone else do this work when the bsdsort is compatible with a  
> recent version of GNU sort.

Seconded for -CURRENT. I think, we should at least provide some brief
document, whatsoever on incompatibilities with the sort implementation that
is currently active in RELENG_9, no matter how buggy it is.

This allows adopters and people, who have to migrate their production systems
to identify and quantify the areas to change and perform some risk management.
This also allows them to move more quickly to the new release, since they
can start with the necessary changes earlier and plan ahead.

We provide such changes usually in the release notes for various tools, we
updated and I think that giving out such a document earlier will be extremely
benefitial for companies, which have to deal with more than one or two
servers running FreeBSD, especially if we know that the currently shipped
implementation is buggy and people most likely will have their own workarounds
for that.

Cheers
Marcus