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According to Jim Meyering on 9/22/2008 6:21 AM:
> Kamil, you may expect to use the new function in ls, too.
> The more I think of this, the more I'm convinced producing
> sensible results is what matters here. Being completely
> compatible with older versions of ls -v is not important.
How does the proposed filevercmp function compare with m4sugar's
m4_version_compare function? That one behaves a bit differently than
glibc's strverscmp; for example, strverscmp says "00" is less than "0",
whereas m4_version_compare says they are equal. m4_version_compare does
not currently handle all bytes, but could possibly be generalized to do
so, if its algorithm is deemed desirable. The m4 algorithm is:
separate the candidate strings into fields at all ',', '.', and '-'
separators. Then, for each field, any alphabetic strings are taken as the
insertion of two new fields, a -1 and then the base-36 value of the
alphabetic string. The comparison then visits one field at a time,
treating blank fields as 0; leading zeros are ignored. Thus, "1" compares
less than "1a" ("1.-1.10"), which in turn is less than "2".
On the other hand, the fact that strverscmp provides a distinction based
on leading zeros is nice, as it guarantees a stable sort (no two strings
that differ on strcmp will compare equal with strverscmp).
- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!
Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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