GNU bug report logs - #49239
Unexpected results with sort -V

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Kamil Dudka <kdudka <at> redhat.com>, Michael Debertol <michael.debertol <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 49239 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#49239: Unexpected results with sort -V
Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:17:16 +0000

On 13/02/2022 05:31, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 6/28/21 10:54, Kamil Dudka wrote:
>> You are right.  The matching algorithm was not implemented correctly and
>> the patch you attached fixes it.
> 
> I looked into Bug#49239 and found some more places where the
> documentation disagreed with the code. I installed the attached patches
> into Gnulib and Coreutils, respectively, which should bring the two into
> agreement and should fix the bugs that Michael reported albeit in a
> different way than his proposed patch. Briefly:
> 
> * The code didn't allow file name suffixes to be the entire file name,
> but the documentation did. Here I went with the documentation. I could
> be talked into the other way; it shouldn't matter much either way.
> 
> * The code did the preliminary test (without suffixes) using strcmp, the
> documentation said it should use version comparison. Here I went with
> the documentation.
> 
> * As Michael mentioned, sort -V mishandled NUL. I fixed this by adding a
> Gnulib function filenvercmp that treats NUL as just another character.
> 
> * As Michael also mentioned, filevercmp fell back on strcmp if version
> sort found no difference, which meant sort's --stable flag was
> ineffective. I fixed this by not having filevercmp fall back on strcmp.
> 
> * I fixed the two-consecutive dot and trailing-dot bugs Michael
> mentioned, by rewriting the suffix finder to not have that confusing
> READ_ALPHA state variable, and to instead implement the regular
> expression's nested * operators in the usual way with nested loops.
> 
> Thanks, Michael, for reporting the problem. I'm boldly closing the
> Coreutils bug report as fixed.

A very thorough analysis.
All looks good.

thank you!
Pádraig

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