Is smserialport broken or am I doing something wrong?

Question

I'm trying to configure a serial port and I keep getting blown off by smserialport. I have tried using the SMC gui and that shows no ports and gives me no actions to add a port. So I went back to the command line :
Firstly, it won't list ports :
# ./smserialport list -u root -p xxx --
Loading Tool: com.sun.admin.serialmgr.cli.SerialMgrCli from sinister
Login to sinister as user root was successful.
Download of com.sun.admin.serialmgr.cli.SerialMgrCli from sinister was successful.
An internal inconsistency was detected at NoListData. Exiting.
So I assume it was badly coded and noone ever considered that there wouldn't be a port, so forgot to have code to deal with that.
I have devices ttya and ttyb :
# ls -l tty?
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Sep 2 18:37 ttya -> ../devices/isa/asy@1,3f8:a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Sep 2 18:37 ttyb -> ../devices/isa/asy@1,2f8:b
So, I try and configure one of those for a terminal
(I have seen a link on Sunsolve for adding a serial port with smserialport, but I don't have enough privs to read it...)
What I have tried so far is based on the man page :
# ./smserialport configure -u root -p xxx -- -n a -b 19200 -t vt100
Loading Tool: com.sun.admin.serialmgr.cli.SerialMgrCli from sinister
Login to sinister as user root was successful.
Download of com.sun.admin.serialmgr.cli.SerialMgrCli from sinister was successful.
Error: Invalid serial port name: a
Usage:
smserialport configure [-H host:port] [-u user] [-p password] [-r rolename] [-l rolepassword] [-D domain] --
-n port_name [-x device=terminal] [-b baudrate] [-t terminal_type] [-l login_prompt] [-c Comment]
-n port_name [-x device=modemdialin] [-b baudrate] [-t terminal_type] [-l login_prompt] [-c Comment]
-n port_name [-x device=modemdialout] [-b baudrate] [-t terminal_type] [-l login_prompt] [-c Comment]
-n port_name [-x device=modemdialinout] [-b baudrate] [-t terminal_type] [-l login_prompt] [-c Comment]
-n port_name [-x device=initializeonly] [-b baudrate] [-t terminal_type] [-l login_prompt] [-c Comment]
So what am I missing? It looks to me like it can't detect my serial ports in /dev, which I can do with an 'ls' command.
Thanks,
Max

Answer 1

So, I figured it out.
Sometimes I want the exact opposite order than is (reliably) possible given the table sort algorithm.
If, in a table sort function, one replaces:
return order
with
return not order
(in a perfectly working sort function), it reverses the order of the sort but may not handle the last element properly.
The reason is this:
The table sort return value is determining whether to swap two values or not to swap them, it is *not* determining absolute ordering - if it were, then returning true would mean order one way, and returning false would mean order the opposite way.
Enough talk - test plugin: http://www.robcole.com/_temp/TestLrPlugins/Scratch_LrPlugin_0.0.zip
(Instructions: In plugin manager, click 'Local Test' button. Source code is in ExtendedManager.lua (tableSortTest function) and Framework/Data/Table.lua (reverseSortCopy method).
Rob