[PATCH] manual: Remove incorrect claim that qsort() can be stabilized
Alfred M. Szmidt
ams@gnu.org
Tue Jul 1 08:58:00 GMT 2014
-If you want the effect of a stable sort, you can get this result by
-writing the comparison function so that, lacking other reason
-distinguish between two elements, it compares them by their addresses.
-Note that doing this may make the sorting algorithm less efficient, so
-do it only if necessary.
+Previous versions of this manual incorrectly claimed that you can get
+the effect of a stable sort by writing the comparison function to
+compare the element addresses as a last resort. This does not work
+because, under certain conditions, @var{qsort} falls back to an in-place
+algorithm that compares some elements after moving them around in
+memory. The only way to perform a stable sort with @var{qsort} is to
+first augment the objects with a monotonic counter of some kind.
Personally, I think this blurb should be put in the NEWS file not
here. To some extent it is a user-visible change.
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