Subject: Re: bug#45260: 28.0.50; Maybe flex should only sort when there is no sorting metadata?

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2021 17:49:39 +0300

On 17.08.2021 17:05, João Távora wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 13:43 Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
>     On 17.08.2021 13:41, João Távora wrote:
>      > I've
>      > not seen an example of a table where its original sorting
>     mattered more
>      > _when_  there is some search pattern.
> 
>     Do you have examples of completion tables which do specify sorting, but
>     where flex sorting obviously should take precedence?
> 
> 
> No, do you? Love to see them, or the converse. But does it matter? Flex 
> is for searching with patterns, stable sorted by scores, solving ties 
> with whatever sort order came first. Dmitry/flex, or Flix, or Flax, may 
> be something else, you understand? It's by design like this.

If there aren't any such significant cases, flex could do what Omar is 
suggesting, solving the reported problem with no real downside. I would 
admit it to be a hackish move, but no more so than the recent commit 
ab23fa4.

Having multiple similar styles is of course an option, but it comes with 
code duplication and associated inconveniences (how many such styles 
should Emacs include OOTB?).

That could be solved with some more general approach, like have both 
styles and completion tables return sorting scores (with documented 
possible values and meanings), and do the combined sorting somewhere in 
the layer above. Then the user could choose the combining strategy, 
configured separately.