bug#7489: [coreutils] over aggressive threads in sort

[Assaf Gordon]

(triaging old bugs)
Hello,

This long thread ( http://bugs.gnu.org/7489 )
deals with multiple parallel-sort bugs, resulting in many commits:
====
1d0a12037  Paul Eggert   2010-12-22 sort: minor performance tweak with 
num_processors
41159f960  Pádraig Brady 2010-12-20 maint: fix a typo in sort --parallel 
help message
0e181024c  Pádraig Brady 2010-12-18 sort: use at most 8 threads by default
8e81a99c2  Paul Eggert   2010-12-16 sort: do not generate thousands of 
subprocesses for 16-way merge
1b31ce698  Paul Eggert   2010-12-16 sort: fix hang with sort --compress
f3c584d1e  Paul Eggert   2010-12-16 sort: don't dump core when merging 
from input twice
14ad7a255  Paul Eggert   2010-12-14 sort: fix very-unlikely buffer 
overrun when merging to input file
8f40ed634  Paul Eggert   2010-12-14 sort: document --compress reaper fixes
0da4d8430  Paul Eggert   2010-12-13 sort: fix some --compress reaper bugs
ad61335bf  Jim Meyering  2010-12-11 sort: avoid segfault when using two 
or more threads
9a9d69e9e  Jim Meyering  2010-12-11 sort: syntax cleanup
27e997d0e  Paul Eggert   2010-12-11 sort: integer overflow checks in 
thread counts, etc.
c9db0ac6d  Chen Guo      2010-12-10 sort: preallocate merge tree nodes 
to heap.
d1f700355  Paul Eggert   2010-12-10 sort: comment fix
621876ff4  Chen Guo      2010-12-06 sort: use mutexes, not spinlocks 
(avoid busy loop on blocked output)
a1629ba1e  Jim Meyering  2010-12-05 tests: remove useless definition of 
$SORT in sort-compress
cd00fa6ee  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: merge_queue -> queue
fb282c7b3  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: clarify queue_check_insert
fb41e82c7  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: fix problems with merge node 
dest pointer
f2d977aff  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: simplify write_unique
6f4279421  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: put queue arg first
f35f4b339  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: tune struct_merge_node slightly
eb989f4b7  Paul Eggert   2010-12-03 sort: Clarify comments
0ec869e8b  Paul Eggert   2010-12-01 sort: fix bug on 64-bit hosts with 
at least 32768 processors
===

All the above were included in coreutils 8.8.

I assume the sort bugs are fixed, despite no 'final' message in the thread.

If there are no objections, I'll close this bug in couple of days.

-assaf