From owner-freebsd-ports  Wed Mar 28 15:47:50 2001
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Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 01:47:45 +0200
From: Anton Berezin <tobez@tobez.org>
To: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@freebsd.org>
Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org, knu@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: pkg_version comparison routine
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	"Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@freebsd.org>, freebsd-ports@freebsd.org,
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References: <200103280237.f2S2bUP02277@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com> <20010328231956.B34676@heechee.tobez.org> <200103282335.f2SNZ2526600@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>
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In-Reply-To: <200103282335.f2SNZ2526600@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>; from bmah@freebsd.org on Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 03:35:02PM -0800
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On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 03:35:02PM -0800, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
> If memory serves me right, Anton Berezin wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 06:37:30PM -0800, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm going to revisit an issue long overdue...the fact that the
> > > algorithm used by pkg_version(1) for comparing versions doesn't work
> > > in all the cases specified by the Porter's Handbook.  knu tried to get
> > > my attention on this issue a number of months ago, even going so far
> > > as to submit some patches to fix this problem.  Unfortunately I
> > > dropped the ball on this, and I'm sure he's understandably annoyed at
> > > me.
> > 
> > We not just steal a little snippet from devel/p5-Sort-Versions?
> > 
> > I believe it handles most insane possibilities.
> 
> Hmmm.  Well, for starters I didn't know this existed.  I'm not sure I 
> understand all of it, but it looks like it handles pretty much every 
> case in the Porter's Handbook (plus others from our own Ports 
> Collection).
> 
> What's the licensing on this thing?  (pkg_version is part of the base 
> system now, for better or worse, so we'd need to import this code into 
> src/.)

The usual `same as perl' thingy.  I.e., either GPL or Artistic, user's
choice.  If necessary, I am sure it is possible to negotiate with the
author, Kenneth J. Albanowski <kjahds@kjahds.com>.

> Other than that the only thing that comes to mind is NIH, which I'll
> freely admit to.  :-)

Heh.  First I encountered similar code in Mandrake (!) rpm tools or
something.  It was GPL and it was was *horribly* twisted:

   sub version_compare {
      my ($a, $b) = @_;
      $a = $a.' ';
      $b = $b.' ';
      local $_;
      while ($a || $b) {
	 my ($sb, $sa) =  map { $1 if /^\W*\d/ ? s/^\W*0*(\d+)// : s/^\W*(\D+)// } ($b, $a);
	 $_ = length($sa) cmp length($sb) || $sa cmp $sb and return $_;
      }
   }

I needed something to compare versions, and was specifically looking for
a non-GPL thingy, I looked more, and to my surprise found this old rusty
module in *our* port collection.  :-)

Cheers,
&Anton.
-- 
May the tuna salad be with you.

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