fix: sort listing by version number in natural order

[kianmeng]

Summary

This PR fixes the issue where the installed versions from asdf list or asdf list <plugin command are not sorted in natural order.

Other Information

Before:

$ asdf list elixir
   ...
  1.8.0-otp-20
  1.8.1
  1.8.1-otp-21
  1.8.1-otp-22
  1.8.2
  1.8.2-otp-21
  1.8.2-otp-22
  1.9
  1.9.1
  1.9.1-otp-22
  1.9.2-otp-22
  1.9.4
  1.9.4-otp-22
  master
  master-otp-24

After:

$ asdf list elixir
  ...
  1.12
  1.12.0
  1.12.1
  1.12.1-otp-24
  1.12.3-otp-23
  1.12.3-otp-24
  1.13.0-rc.0-otp-24
  1.13.0-rc.1-otp-24
  master
  master-otp-24

[jthegedus]

Hi @kianmeng are you able to share resources on how portable ls -v is? We were previously using -1 elsewhere so not concerned with that. We would need to ensure -v works on all major shells and OSs we support.

Tests would also need to be updated, ideally with versions that exhibit this behaviour should a regression occur.

[kianmeng]

Hi @kianmeng are you able to share resources on how portable ls -v is? We were previously using -1 elsewhere so not concerned with that. We would need to ensure -v works on all major shells and OSs we support.

I will assume the supported OSes are GNU/Linux and macOS and supported Shells are Bash, Zsh, and Fish? Is there any minimum version requirement for these Shells?

Tests would also need to be updated, ideally with versions that exhibit this behaviour should a regression occur.

Noted.

[jthegedus]

I will assume the supported OSes are GNU/Linux and macOS and supported Shells are Bash, Zsh, and Fish? Is there any minimum version requirement for these Shells?

This is mostly it. OSs: GNU/Linux, macOS. Shells: Bash, ZSH, Fish, Elvish.

Is there any minimum version requirement for these Shells?

We don't have official version targets (something we wish to capture), but as low as possible.

[Stratus3D]

Is there a way to achieve this without ls? I've been considering banning ls from the codebase because it's caused a couple bugs in the past.

[kianmeng]

None I can think of or found. Perhaps we can't or shouldn't implement this feature since using ls is not universal applicable for all platforms.

Your thoughts? @jthegedus @Stratus3D

[Stratus3D]

Would it not be possible to do this with sort?

[Stratus3D]

I guess part of the problem here is that when we list all versions of a plugin, we call out to the plugin's list-all callback, which is responsible for returning versions in the correct order. Here we are dealing with a subset of those same versions, but we don't have a way of calling out to the plugin to sort them.

[Stratus3D]

I suppose we could add another plugin callback that would receive a list of versions and would be expected to sort them, but I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle (we'd have to implement it in every plugin, or default to sorting versions as semantic versions.

[Stratus3D]

Thanks for your PR @kianmeng . I'm sorry I did not give you feedback sooner. We decided to move forward with banning ls in the codebase as its output is intended for human use and not machine. There are also some portability issues as not every platform supports every flag. Instead we recommend using find to achieve the same thing.

If you can achieve this with find we may consider an alternative approach. Closing this PR for now.

[kianmeng]

@Stratus3D Noted, and thanks for the explanation.