[bug #52076] wildcard/glob should be sorted

[Ximin Luo]

Follow-up Comment #15, bug #52076 (project make):

Hi, just poking this bug report to voice support for sorting $(wildcard)
again. It would be more efficient than patching hundreds of upstream
projects.

Yes, I understand that "if upstream projects want reproducible builds
everywhere they should use $(sort)". That is not incompatible with supporting
a sorted $(wildcard) in GNU make. This would improve the default situation at
least for GNU/Linux distributions where GNU make is the default. (And it's
2017, this is the majority use-case in the FOSS world at least.)

Later, other Make implementations might follow suit, and we'd welcome this as
well - and would actively pursue this, when we find time to do that.

I investigated this issue with Bernhard originally, and also was curious at
the lack of documentation pointing to specific discussion around the
"performance" issue. Looking at the code, what was actually changed in
b9f831b8 was the utility function multi_glob (which today is parse_file_seq),
which is also used at various other parts of the code not related to
func_wildcard.

What I *conjecture* is that, if there was a performance issue, it might have
been related to those other uses of multi_glob / parse_file_seq and not
$(wildcard) itself. (The commit doesn't mention $(wildcard)). Does that ring
any bells, Paul? In which case, one possible fix might be to add a SORT
parameter to parse_file_seq, make it false by default, but in func_wildcard
make it true. Then that would preserve whatever performance improvements that
the original code might have made.


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