Segmentation fault on non-strings

[bbugh]

Thanks for this gem, it's much faster than any of the other ones.

We've run into an issue that is easy to work around but I thought it worth reporting so it can have a better check than a segfault.

Issue: Passing an array of non-strings creates a segfault.

Expectation: Error message, exception, or automatic conversion to string.

Actual: the Ruby interpreter dies, taking the whole server down with it.

Reproduce:

Unnatural.sort([1, 2, 3])
# => segfault

Unnatural.sort([1..5, 8..6])
# => segfault

Unnatural.sort([:one, :two])
# => segfault

# ironically does not segfault:
Unnatural.sort([Object.new, Object.new])
=> [#<Object:0x007fdee21af130>, #<Object:0x007fdee21af108>]

We can, of course, use to_s with sort_by but I don't think it should break everything with the wrong type. 😄

[bjmllr]

What version of the gem are you using? I can reproduce the segfault on 0.2.0, but on 0.3.1 I get a TypeError:

pry> Unnatural::Fast.sort([1, 2, 3])
TypeError: no implicit conversion of Fixnum into String

[bbugh]

Hi there!

I have whatever version is installed by gem 'unnatural', just added it today.

Gemfile.lock says it's 0.2.0:

    unnatural (0.2.0)

[bjmllr]

Strange, 0.3.1 was pushed to rubygems.org before today so you should have gotten that version. If you didn't give a specific version in Gemfile, maybe try bundle update unnatural? Or see if gem install unnatural -v0.3.1 gives an error?

[bbugh]

Good thought, manually installing with gem install unnatural -v0.3.1 worked fine.

I then completely deleted all traces of unnatural from my system and Gemfile, re-ran bundler, added unnatural back to my Gemfile and ran bundler again, and it still installed 0.2.0. This is with ruby 2.2.4p230 (2015-12-16 revision 53155) [x86_64-darwin16].

I went to a non-rvm locked directory and made a new Gemfile, and it installed 0.3.1. That's with ruby 2.5.0p0 (2017-12-25 revision 61468) [x86_64-darwin16].

Maybe it's a dependency thing.

[bbugh]

Further investigation, I added gem 'unnatural', '~> 0.3.1' and that showed the problem. The package gemspec is locking to a particular rake version, which seems like it should be a dev dependency and not a package dependency.

Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/............
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.
Resolving dependencies....
Bundler could not find compatible versions for gem "rake":
  In snapshot (Gemfile.lock):
    rake (= 12.0.0)

  In Gemfile:
    ... 

    unnatural (~> 0.3.1) was resolved to 0.3.1, which depends on
      rake (< 12, >= 9)

Running `bundle update` will rebuild your snapshot from scratch, using only
the gems in your Gemfile, which may resolve the conflict.

This seems to be the culprit: https://github.com/bjmllr/unnatural/blob/669c8e9/unnatural.gemspec#L26

[bjmllr]

I have removed that line and released a new version (0.3.2). Does this fix the problem for you? rake is still a runtime dependency since ffi-compiler uses it, but there should be no version restriction any more.