On 09/07/2012 09:43 AM, Niels Möller wrote:
Jim Meyering<j...@meyering.net> writes:
The existing code can factor arbitrarily large numbers quickly, as long
as they have no large prime factors. We should retain that capability.
My understanding is that most gnu/linux distributions build coreutils
without linking to gmp. So lots of users don't get this capability.
If this is an important feature, maybe one should consider bundling
mini-gmp and use that as a fallback in case coreutils is configured
without gmp (see
http://gmplib.org:8000/gmp/file/7677276bdf92/mini-gmp/README). I would
expect it to be a constant factor (maybe 10) times slower than the real
gmp for numbers up to a few hundred bits (for larger numbers, it gets
much slower due to lack of sophisticated algorithms, but we probably
can't factor them in reasonable time anyway).
Bundling libraries is bad if one needed to update it.
The correct approach here is to file a bug against
your distro to enable gmp which is trivial matter
of adding the build and runtime dependency on gmp.
cheers,
Pádraig.
