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.