Re: "make check" failure with sort-compress on OSF and Linux

[Dan Hipschman]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 12:57:49AM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Even so, sort needs a better fall-back position for when it fails to
> fork a decompression process (failing to start a compression process
> isn't a big problem).  If it can't fork the process, it should simply
> revert to decompressing each stream as it reads it.  This is possible
> (easy, even) when using gzip or bzip2, and part of the reason I want to
> limit the list of compressors to programs like those that provide the
> required procedural interfaces.

Last resort, if you don't have the time to fix it, just don't make
compression the default for the upcoming stable release.  I.e., leave
the option in, but require it to be explicitly requested.  I'd love to
help, but I'm not sure how long it will take me to do this with my
current schedule.