these terrible sort operators were working everywhere except on bsd, where qsort is stricter
(cherry picked from commit 669819cc2941fc50b392676c61c4d54864502e45)
avoid potential problems when tracing comms coming from any source,
whithout using status to track its origin.
(cherry picked from commit 58edfe47ba68e2729d8a098423fd9237435108eb)
Remove any reference to mergesort.

* it was in fact never used (see commit 7f6d42b)
* it's not standard
* according to http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mergesort&sektion=3,
  - it may fail
  - it's generally slower than qsort
  - it has requirements on its parameter "size"
  - it requires additional memory
(cherry picked from commit d5c11dbc7ac52c97c04aee539dbf9e69a2a68f68)