bug#23677: sort --debug not ignoring punctuation when sort does

[Eric Blake]

On 06/02/2016 03:28 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
>     They are not ignored, just considered only secondary, if the first
>     order characters didn't provide an ordering.
> 
> Ok.  One would have no clue of that, either, from the --debug output.
> 
> sort obviously knows the exact rules defined by the locale, or it
> couldn't do its job.

sort merely calls strcoll(); all the rules are a black box to sort, and
are really something that you have to know how strcoll() uses locale
definitions.

>  How about a way to dump the rules in some
> human-readable way?  (In sort or another utility or a separate program
> or whatever.)  Similar to how James Youngman found a way to write out
> regex definitions in Texinfo ... just a wish ... -karl

It might be nicer to request the glibc folks to give human-readable
descriptions of their locale files, and how strcoll() is affected by
those definitions, since it is more than just sort(1) that is impacted.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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