Re: [PATCH 5/5] versioncmp: cope with common leading parts in versionsort.prereleaseSuffix

["SZEDER Gábor" <szeder@ira.uka.de>]

Quoting SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>:

> Version sort with prerelease reordering sometimes puts tagnames in the
> wrong order, when the common part of two compared tagnames ends with
> the leading character(s) of one or more configured prerelease
> suffixes.
>
>   $ git config --get-all versionsort.prereleaseSuffix
>   -beta
>   $ git tag -l --sort=version:refname v2.1.*
>   v2.1.0-beta-2
>   v2.1.0-beta-3
>   v2.1.0
>   v2.1.0-RC1
>   v2.1.0-RC2
>   v2.1.0-beta-1
>   v2.1.1
>   v2.1.2
>
> The reason is that when comparing a pair of tagnames, first
> versioncmp() looks for the first different character in a pair of
> tagnames, and then the swap_prereleases() helper function checks for
> prerelease suffixes _starting at_ that character.  Thus, when in the
> above example the sorting algorithm happens to compare the tagnames
> "v2.1.0-beta-1" and "v2.1.0-RC2", swap_prereleases() will try to match
> the suffix "-beta" against "beta-1" to no avail, and the two tagnames
> erroneously end up being ordered lexicographically.
>
> To fix this issue change swap_prereleases() to look for configured
> prerelease suffixes containing that first different character.

Now, while I believe this is the right thing to do to fix this bug,
there is a corner case, where multiple configured prerelease suffixes
might match the same tagname:

   $ git config --get-all versionsort.prereleaseSuffix
   -bar
   -baz
   -foo-bar
   $ ~/src/git/git tag -l --sort=version:refname
   v1.0-foo-bar
   v1.0-foo-baz

I.e. when comparing these two tags, both "-bar" and "-foo-bar" would
match "v1.0-foo-bar", and as "-bar" comes first in the config file,
it wins, and "v1.0-foo-bar" is ordered first.  An argument could be
made to prefer longer matches, in which case "v1.0-foo-bar" would be
ordered according to "-foo-bar", i.e. as second.  However, I don't
know what that argument could be, to me neither behavior is better
than the other, but the implementation of the "longest match counts"
would certainly be more complicated.

The argument I would make is that this is a pathological corner case
that doesn't worth worrying about.


Best,
Gábor