ordering of tags (Re: [MERGE] show (possibly dotted) revnos in `bzr tags` (v3))

[Aaron Bentley]

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Adeodato Simó wrote:
> * Jelmer Vernooij [Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:05:25 +0200]:
> 
>> I don't think sorting should be by revno. You run 'bzr tags' to see what
>> tags are present and where tags are pointing at. Having the tags sorted
>> by tag name makes it much easier to find a particular tag in the list.
> 
> I beg to differ. I think chronological order makes much more sense for
> tags

That's a valid opinion, but sorting by chronological order is different
from sorting by revno.  If chronological order is what you're after, you
can use the timestamp field in revisions.

>: it's like a log operation, where only the "tag: " lines are shown.

Viewing a summary is not the only use case.  People will sometimes want
to find the revno for a tag.  They will also want to find out whether a
tag exists or not.  For both these cases, lexicographical sort is a far
superior display.

Also, I think that people will tend to expect that a display is sorted
by the leftmost column by default.

So I think lexicographical sort should be available as an option at
minimum, and I prefer it as the default.

> Plus for most cases, given the names people normally use, it'll be
> pretty much the same as lexicographical order, except that it will get
> foo-0.1, foo-0.2 and foo-0.10 right.

Disagree.  Some people will use different prefixes for different kinds
of tags.  e.g.:
devel-3
devel-4
release-3.27
release-3.28
release-4.7

Aaron
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