bug#10877: Wimpy external files.

[Paul Eggert]

On 02/25/2012 11:14 PM, Rogier Wolff wrote:

> Many modern operating systems do "lazy" allocation.

Sure, that's an old trick.  But this has its own problems:
it can mean a process *thinks* it has memory allocated, but it
doesn't *really* have the memory; which means when it tries to
actually *use* its memory it can get killed.  This is not a direction
we want 'sort' to head.

> a slight change in the codebase might be in order
> for "unknown sort size".

Sorry, I didn't follow the rest of that comment.  Perhaps you
could suggest a patch?  That might explain things better.
"diff -u" format is typically best.