On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 01:54:15PM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:

quoted

quoted

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