Re: Apparently irrational behaviour in sort

[The Wanderer]

Eric Blake wrote:

> According to The Wanderer on 12/4/2005 9:56 AM:
>
> > I would suggest that it might be a good idea to provide a more
> > detailed explanation of this behaviour in the documentation. From
> > the man page, I did not even figure out that "the whitespace
> > between the fields belongs to the following field", much less
> > exactly what the -b option would do. A more in-depth explanation
> > would have saved me hours of yanking at my hair in frustration. If
> > the somewhat abbreviated nature of the man page is intentional,
> > then at the least it might be a good idea to provide an explanation
> > in the online coreutils FAQ.
>
> Documentation patches are always welcome, if you would like to submit
> one.

I had considered that, but did not have a clear idea of what to add or
where to add it... and, now that I've both thought about that further
and looked more closely, the copy of the source I have (from Debian's
5.93 source package) does not appear to contain the file from which
sort.1 is autogenerated, at least not in any obvious location.

Leaving aside the issue of the appropriateness of submitting patches
made against anything but the development version, where would I find
the correct file to edit?

> > I might be interested, at least academically, in the reasoning
> > behind the decision to make the whitespace part of the following
> > field rather than either the preceding one or neither; do you have
> > any idea when the discussion which led to that decision might have
> > taken place?
>
> The decision pre-dates GNU sort, as it was the behavior of legacy
> sort utilities on early Unix systems.  It was codified into POSIX, so
> you are pretty much stuck with that design decision:
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/sort.html

Hmp. Okay, thanks. The constraint is explicitly referred to in only one
mention in one paragraph of the Extended Description, but it's certainly
there; presumably I'd have to find archives of the meetings of the group
which defines such standards in order to learn the reasoning.

(On completely another subject, and quite offtopic, do you happen to
know where one would go to complain about problems arising from mailing
lists which do not set the Reply-To header to the list address?)

--
      The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.