On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:59 AM, Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Missing documentation in NEWS and doc/coreutils.texi.
>
> Based on just the diffstat, this patch is non-trivial, so we'd need
> copyright assignment to the FSF from both you and from Alex Shinn, as
> co-authors of this material.  Is that something you are interested in
> pursuing?  I'm refraining from reviewing the patch itself, in case we
> need to come up with a clean-room reimplementation.

Apologies for creating this mess on the mailing list -- the patch you
glanced at was the first of two that I sent (see bug #6366 for the
second). I'm including a third here. Compared to the first, I've made
the following changes:
- Added documentation (both NEWS and doc/coreutils.texi).
- Added tests.
- Reimplemented the numeric comparison functionality by copying code
from sort.c.
Due to the reimplementation, just about all of Alex's patch has been
replaced (except for the bits where there's obviously one right way to
do it, e.g. parsing the new options). Also, since I copied most of the
code from sort.c, there's very little truly original code in the whole
patch (mostly old code blocks in new places). If a copyright
assignment is needed, I'd be happy to provide that.

Drew