[Bug 1038468] Re: data loss on sort -u

[Colin Watson]

I have run the test case from the bug report on all of hardy, lucid,
natty, and oneiric (albeit in slightly stale chroots and only on i386)
and have confirmed that none of them suffer from this bug.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1038468

Title:
  data loss on sort -u

Status in “coreutils” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “coreutils” source package in Precise:
  Confirmed
Status in “coreutils” source package in Quantal:
  Confirmed
Status in “coreutils” package in Debian:
  New

Bug description:
  Last year a bug was reported to upstream coreutils [1] about problems
  on using 'sort -u'. Until recently, there was no known reproducing
  process; one such process was published last week [2].

  Although triggering the bug can be said to be a non-completely trivial
  use case, data loss in 'sort' should be looked at as a serious issue.

  Today Jim Meyering committed what looks like the final touches of the
  fix (incidentally also solving a different issue (a free memory read),
  also in 'sort'. There are 4 commits affected, and they are shown
  starting in [3].

  Given this is a data loss potential, I am opening this bug for all
  affected releases (this bug affects Coreutils 8.6 onwards -- Precise
  and Quantal). I am still to run the tests on Lucid, Natty, and
  Oneiric.

  [1] http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=9780
  [2]  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2012-08/msg00027.html
  [3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2012-08/msg00057.html

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