[pacman-dev] portable package sorting for shell scripts

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> So it occurs to me that while it's all well and good to have a portable
> package cache cleaner, it's no good at all if it all hinges on a GNU
> sort flag (-V) which poorly approximates what vercmp does. Would we have
> room for sort tool that implements alpm_pkg_vercmp? A simple
> implementation could be as easy as the below... I think this would get a
> lot of mileage out of the AUR/pacman wrapper crowd.
>
> thoughts?

Looks like this just takes a list of newline-separated versions on
stdin then? Seems pretty reasonable, although argument support would
be good as well. I'm also wondering whether supporting `pacman -Q`
style input would be good as well (with package names and version
numbers); thus it would be a smart sort going first by package name,
but then interpreting the second component as a version rather than
string.

> #include <alpm.h>
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <stdlib.h>
> #include <string.h>
>
> #define MAXLEN  4096
If the tool is new, I'd prefer to avoid any buffer/line length restrictions.

>
> int vercmp(const void *p1, const void *p2) {
>  return alpm_pkg_vercmp(*(const char**)p1, *(const char**)p2);
> }
>
> int main(void) {
coding style, brace on next line.
>  char **pkglist = NULL;
>  char *pkg;
This is a tad nitpicky, but since we never load actual package
objects, might be wise to call these namelist and name instead.
>  char buf[MAXLEN + 1];
fgets reads at most n-1 characters and always null-terminates; no need
for the extra byte.
>  int i, pkgcount = 0;
offsets should use size_t.
>
>  while (fgets(buf, MAXLEN + 1, stdin)) {
If you heed my advice above the +1 will have to go away here.
>    pkg = strndup(buf, MAXLEN);
You already know buf is well-bounded, correct? strdup() is sufficient.
>    *(pkg + strlen(pkg) - 1) = '\0';
I'm going to throw a CRLF file at this to test. :)
>    pkglist = realloc(pkglist, ++pkgcount * sizeof(*pkglist));
Would be best to not reallocate every iteration, but instead do smart
progression- start with something small/sane like 4, then double it
each realloc. Also, the ++ works, but I'm not a fan of it inline like
this.
>    *(pkglist + pkgcount - 1) = pkg;
If pkglist is a * instead of a **, I think you will be able to do something like
    pkglist[pkgcount - 1] = pkg;
instead. That also simplifies the dereferences needed in the printf()
below as you can just do pkglist[i] instead. This is all untested, but
I'm basing it roughly off what I ended up doing for the files array
stuff in be_local.c.
>  }
>
>  qsort(pkglist, pkgcount, sizeof(char*), vercmp);
char(space)*, style rules.
>
>  for (i = 0; i < pkgcount; i++) {
>    printf("%s\n", *(pkglist + i));
>    free(*(pkglist + i));
>  }
>  if (pkgcount > 0) {
>    free(pkglist);
>  }
>
>  return 0;
> }