Kamil Dudka writes ("Re: willing to contribute verrevcmp to gnulib?"):
> we use the extended version (handling ~ character), even slightly
> modified to work better with file names (with suffixes). The new
> (gnulib) filevercmp code is in attachment.Sorry, I overlooked this message before. Now I'm really confused. You seem to have already rewritten it. So why are people asking for permission and/or copyright assignment ? I haven't reviewed your implementation for correctness but I will if you want me to. Did you base your version on the Debian specification at http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version ? > /* > TODO: copyright? Who actually wrote that code ? Actually, looking at it it seems to have been created by copying and pasting Anthony Towns's verrevcmp and reformatting it ! This is surely a ridiculous approach. What if it needs to be extended or modified in the future ? You won't be able to just apply patches from dpkg. Reformatting code just for the sake of it is always wrong. NB that this is a technical objection. I'm sure that Anthony Towns, just like any member of the Free Software world, would not try to use copyright law to prevent someone from making stupid modifications to their code. On to a more useful conversation: Can you explain in some more detail why you took the approach that you did for file extensions ? I'm not sure I understand the specific effect. Is it exactly equivalent to adjusting the lexical value of the rightmost `.' in each string to be just greater than `~' ? What about filenames like alice_1.63.orig.tar.gz or linux-2.6.16.21.tar.bz2 alice_1.63-2.dsc linux-2.6.16.21.tar.bz2.sign alice_1.63-2.diff.gz linux-2.6.16.21.tar.gz linux-2.6.16.21.tar.gz.sign ? If you were to just compare whole filenames you get: alice_1.63-2.diff.gz and linux-2.6.16.21.tar.bz2 alice_1.63-2.dsc linux-2.6.16.21.tar.bz2.sign alice_1.63.orig.tar.gz linux-2.6.16.21.tar.gz linux-2.6.16.21.tar.gz.sign which is for alice perhaps not ideal but your algorithm does this alice_1.63-2.diff .gz and linux-2.6.16.21.tar .bz2 alice_1.63-2 .dsc linux-2.6.16.21.tar .gz2 alice_1.63.orig.tar .gz linux-2.6.16.21.tar.bz2 .sign linux-2.6.16.21.tar.gz .sign which is just bizarre (spaces put in to show the cut point) and in the RHS leads to odd results. So I think this wrinkle may be doing more harm than good. We might be better off with a simpler algorithm. Ian.
