CFT: new BSD-licensed sort available

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 11:33:06AM -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Oleg Moskalenko <oleg.moskalenko at citrix.com> writes:
> >
> > Yes, indeed, there was an old sort syntax, where they supported it in
> > a form "+POS1 -POS2". It is a non-POSIX obsolete syntax, so we did
> > not implement it in the new BSD sort. I can add it, if necessary.
> 
> If anyone asked for my opinion, I'd say that I'd prefer to see this
> syntax stamped out instead; it's unnecessary, confusing, and has been
> considered obsolete for decades. A quick look over my workstation's
> filesystems shows just a few uses: in texconfig, libtool, something in
> X11/config, maybe a handful more.
> 
> I'm not sure what the best answer is in practice, but I'm willing to
> spend some of my time working on it if that helps.

I suspect the "right" answer for the near future would be to eliminate
dependence on it wherever you can get such changes accepted by upstream,
and support it as a deprecated (perhaps even undocumented) feature in
bsdsort just so it's easier to entirely eliminate any dependence on
gnusort for purposes of backward compatibility.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]