On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 01:54:15PM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote: > > > It turns out we make never use of a custom compare function in > > > the stringlist, which helps gaining confidence this use case is nowhere > > > to be found in the code. > > > > Plenty of code uses the default strcmp. You can find users which assume > > sorting by their use of string_list_insert() versus _append(). Or ones > > that call string_list_sort(), of course. > > Here comes my reading-between-the-lines assumption: > > When using the default comparison function, you probably only care > about the efficient lookup as described above, but if you had a non-default > order, then we'd have strong evidence of the contrary as the author of such > code would have found reasons why that order is superior than default order > (and don't tell me a different order helps making lookups even more efficient, > this must be another reason). That's a reasonable hypothesis. It looks like there are a few cases where we assign to a string_list.cmp, so I picked one arbitrarily to look at: split_maildir() uses a custom filename comparison. Despite having no recollection of this code, it appears to come from my commit 18505c3423. :) And yes, we really do care about order there, as we're trying to read the files in "maildir order". And I don't think a hash would do. That said, I don't think we care about using string-list's sorted operations here (like its binary-search lookup). It would be enough for us to generate the list (whether as string-list or no; we'd actually be happy with any array), sort it, and then iterate over the result. So I think some of these are definitely going to require some thoughtful conversion to the correct data type. Mostly what I was asking in the beginning was: does this seem like an overtly terrible line of thinking to anyone. And so far I think the answer is no. So the next step is to proceed to actually trying some conversions, and seeing what kinds of snags I hit. The devil, as usual, is in the details. :) -Peff
