Re: CFT: new BSD-licensed sort available

On 14 March 2012 08:59, Gabor Kovesdan <gabor_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> some time ago I started writing a BSDL sort variant from scratch since the
> OpenBSD version did not support multibyte locales and was hard to modify.
> The development was a bit stalled but recently, Oleg Moskalenko
> <oleg.moskalenko_at_citrix.com> showed interest in continuing this version and
> he has made a very good job on this BSD sort variant. Now it is compatible
> with the base version of GNU sort but the performance in most cases (string
> sort and -n) is quite behind GNU sort (although with -g it is about *4
> times* faster). Oleg is still working on optimizing the code and the
> long-term plan is to drop GNU sort once this variant is good enough to
> replace it. For now, it is only available in Ports Collection as
> textproc/bsdsort but if there is no objection or any serious bug report I
> plan to add it to base installed as bsdsort, being GNU sort still the
> default sort until it proves that we can safely drop GNU sort. If you are
> interested in this sort utility, could you please try the port and report us
> any issue that you experience?

Hi,

This makes me think of the whole debian-y way of replacing the mailer
programs using some magic alias program.

So you could intall gnusort, bsdsort, and then some config file would
determine which was used.

'sort' would then be a symlink to said magic program, that'd look at
its argv[0], look at the contents of that file, and exec() the right
one.

Would that be helpful herE?



Adrian