NMERGE hardcoded in sort.c

[Paul Courbis]

Hi

I'm using "sort" to, surprisingly, sort huge files (up to 2 GB). Of 
course I had to use the -S switch to tune memory usage. My concern is that I
don't have enough memory to sort in RAM, thus sort is using temporary 
files tat it merges to get the final result.

Having a look to sort's sources I noticed that NMERGE is hardocoded 
(it's not even an option).

My questions are :

- I did a patch to make sort accept a new option (currently called -N to 
setup NMERGE). Is someone interested by this patch ?
- I'm doing some benches, but I already noticed that 16 (the hardcoded 
value) is not always the best one. For example my first serie of benches 
showed me that 18 is better in this particular case. Did someone worked 
on a model allowing to guess what would be the best value for NMERGE for 
a given set of data to sort ?

Any hint would be apreciated

regards

Paul