On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 06:52:08PM -0700, Frederik Eaton wrote: > So, what is the current state of things? Who is in charge of accepting > patches?
The coreutils maintainers, who are all subscribed to this list I think. So, you're asking in the right place. > Are we decided that a 'shuffle' command but no 'sort -R' facility > would be best I think the consensus is that the functionality belongs in "sort". Beyond that things are a bit less clear. However, Paul put forward a proposed usage which adapts the current -k option (see http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-05/msg00179.html). Nobody made any comments suggesting that that wasn't a good way of doing things. > or that it would be good to have both, or is it still in question > whether either would be accepted? Both is probably uncalled for though I personally would put something like this in /usr/local/bin/shuffle: #! /bin/sh exec sort -k R -- "$@" Having said this, in the past people have expressed the sentiment that perhaps a separate command would be a good idea (for example http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2004-09/msg00007.html). Last time this was discussed on this list there was some talk about selecting permutations with a seed. This makes me uncomfortable since though doubtless it would be convenient. The problem is that the number of permutations of the records of most files is larger than 2^64, and so representing the seed and making use of it would be very tricky. I then had a look at Fascicle 2 of volume 4 of Knuth, but it concentrates on generating all permutations, and so wasn't directly much help. Regards, James. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
