factor compiled without bignum support

[Mechanical snail]

factor (from GNU coreutils) in Ubuntu Lucid appears to be compiled without bignum support. According to the info page:
   If `factor' is built without using GNU MP, only single-precision
arithmetic is available, and so large numbers (typically 2^64 and
above) will not be supported.

Example:
user@host:/$ factor 123456789098765432123456789
factor: `123456789098765432123456789' is too large

In order to limit dependencies of the basic coreutils package, perhaps a bignum-supporting version should be packaged separately.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Thank you for opening this bug and helping make Ubuntu better. Indeed, gmp is not being used, so I am confirming this bug. I am not sure why, though, and will check upstream.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

build of factor with GNU MP support is conditional (via configure): if the development files for GMP are available, then the code is compiled for it, otherwise no GMP extensions are used.

It seems all that is needed to be done is to add libgmp3-dev as a build-depends (the actual library package, currently libgmp3c2, will be automatically added as a run-time dependency); GMP is in main.

This, on the other hand, adds ~320k to the ISO (the new run-time dependency). I will open a bug on Debian (our upstream for coreutils).