Re: [RFC PATCH 1/7] Makefile: alphabetically sort += lists

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 22, 2019, 11:34 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq7e4xko8v.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20191021195413.GB3959@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> ...
>> I agree with you that it did correctly sort them in ASCII order.
>
> What's the purpose of sorting them, though? I thought it was less for
> aesthetics and more to to keep lines deterministic (to avoid two
> branches adding the same line in different places, thus causing
> weirdness when the two are merged). In that case, I think we care less
> about the exact order and more that anybody can easily reproduce the
> same sort (by running "10:!sort" or whatever you weird emacs-types would
> type).

In the ideal world, "sort" would have a handy option we can tell it to reshuffle the ASCII table in such a way that all punctuations come before alphanumeric, making sure "/" and "." are the first two letters in the alphabet, and everybody can use it to sort the lines reproducibly and also readably. But I do not know of such a widely used implementation of "sort", so...

If we had known better, we would have used such a custom sort order to sort the index entries, making sure that slash sorts before any other byte ;-)