Re: master 71783e9: Add the string-numeric-lessp function

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Looks nice, but I don't think that's a very good function name.  It
> sounds like something that is only meant to be used for version strings,
> instead of something that happens to work on version strings as well..

Not quite sure I'm following. Every string is a version string.

The function name was inspired by glibc's strverscmp; see:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/String_002fArray-Comparison.html#index-strverscmp

Please feel free to change the name.


> And is this supposed to be this way?
>
> (string-version-lessp "foo001.png" "foo1.png")

Yes, if the version numbers and everything else result in a tie, it falls back 
on straight lexicographic comparison. Having the function be anything other than 
a total order would cause problems in sorting functions that use it to compare.


Oh, and in response to one of your other questions: this function should be 
useful for package versions as well as file names. For example, I recently 
updated my libc-bin version on Ubuntu from 2.21-0ubuntu4 to 2.21-0ubuntu4.1 as 
part of the getaddrinfo security update.