Re: feature request: gzip/bzip support for sort

[Jim Meyering]

Dan Hipschman <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 08:08:18AM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> I've checked in your changes, then changed NEWS a little:
>
> Great!  Thanks :-)
>
>> Additionally, I'm probably going to change the documentation so that
>> people will be less likely to depend on being able to run a separate
>> program.  To be precise, I'd like to document that the only valid values
>> of GNUSORT_COMPRESSOR are the empty string, "gzip" and "bzip2"[*].
>> Then we will have the liberty to remove the exec calls and use library
>> code instead, thus making the code a little more efficient -- but mainly,
>> more robust.
>
> Why not add a special value 'libz' and document it as follows:

We'll see.  I'm really inclined to disallow the exec option,
unless someone provides a good use case to justify it.  It's fun to add
features, but so far that one is not justified, given its downsides.

> By the way, I've got a little amendment to the patch.  I took a look at
> gnulib's findprog module, and it turns out find_in_path does an access-
> X_OK itself, so sort doesn't need to do it again.
>
>
> 2007-01-24  Dan Hipschman  <address@hidden>
>
>       * src/sort.c (create_temp): Remove superfluous access-X_OK
>       check.  find_in_path does this for us.

Thanks.  Applied.