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bcmills opened this issue Jun 19, 2019 · 8 comments
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x/mod: semver.Max does more than compute the max #32700

bcmills opened this issue Jun 19, 2019 · 8 comments
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@bcmills
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bcmills commented Jun 19, 2019

Currently, semver.Max canonicalizes its arguments according to semver.Canonical:
https://play.golang.org/p/04IP9gNhFWH

To me, the name Max does not evoke “canonicalize”, and the action of canonicalizing is potentially fairly destructive: for example, if I have a version with a +incompatible build suffix, that version is canonical according to module.CanonicalVersion, but will not be preserved by a call to semver.Max.

@rsc points out that the canonicalization avoids ambiguity: v0.1.0+a and v0.1.0+b have the same precedence, so if we call semver.Max("v0.1.0+a", "v0.1.0+b") we would otherwise have to pick one arbitrarily, and semver.org says “Build metadata SHOULD be ignored when determining version precedence.”

Instead, I propose that Max should always return one of its arguments. Build metadata must comprise only the usual dot-separated ASCII identifiers, so if we have two versions with equal precedence it seems to me that we could break the tie using the usual rule for comparing pre-release suffixes.

CC @jayconrod @hyangah
@bcmills bcmills added NeedsInvestigation Someone must examine and confirm this is a valid issue and not a duplicate of an existing one. modules labels Jun 19, 2019
@gopherbot gopherbot added this to the Unreleased milestone Jun 19, 2019
@bcmills bcmills mentioned this issue Dec 20, 2019
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@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/212200 mentions this issue: cmd/go: avoid erroneous canonicalization when trying to resolve imports using replacements

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Change https://golang.org/cl/212202 mentions this issue: cmd/go/internal/modfetch/codehost: replace a dubious call to semver.Max

gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Dec 20, 2019
cmd/go: avoid erroneous canonicalization when trying to resolve impor…

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751aea8 
…ts using replacements

Updates #32700
Fixes #33795

Change-Id: I16897a0a2f3aa2f0b0bf8cf8252f3f39eef2e7ba
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/212200
Run-TryBot: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Dec 20, 2019
cmd/go/internal/modfetch/codehost: replace a dubious call to semver.Max

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3f51350 
The documentation for RecentTag indicates that it returns an actual
tag, not a canonicalized prefix+version blob equivalent to a tag,
so the canonicalization due to semver.Max seems like a bug here.

Fortunately, RecentTag is not currently ever actually used as a tag,
so the removal of metadata does not result in a user-facing bug.
Nonetheless, it may be a subtle source of confusion for maintainers
in the future.

Updates #32700

Change-Id: I525423c1c0c7ec7c36c09e53b180034474f74e5a
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/212202
Run-TryBot: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
@bcmills bcmills mentioned this issue May 13, 2020
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@dsymonds
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Alternatively, replace Max with Less, which just returns a bool. It is trivial to wrap to get the existing Max semantics in existing code, and avoids the issue by not even trying to return one arg or the other.

@bcmills
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bcmills commented May 14, 2020

@dsymonds, we already have Compare, which is even more ergonomic than Less in general. But it's true that we could just remove Max instead of providing a version of it with dubious semantics.

@dsymonds
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Oh, I overlooked Compare. Yeah, Max seems extra pointless; callers who care can use Compare, then if they actually care about canonicalisation they can use Canonical explicitly.

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Change https://golang.org/cl/269357 mentions this issue: semver: deprecate semver.Max

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Change https://golang.org/cl/269338 mentions this issue: cmd/go: migrate away from semver.Max

gopherbot pushed a commit to golang/mod that referenced this issue Nov 12, 2020
semver: deprecate semver.Max

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3bfbaad 
There are a number of calls to semver.Max in the wild, so let's not
delete it yet.

For golang/go#32700

Change-Id: I515b05f174195d1b82a931b92e21b83c370ef7c7
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/mod/+/269357
Trust: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
Run-TryBot: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Go Bot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
gopherbot pushed a commit that referenced this issue Nov 12, 2020
cmd/go: migrate away from semver.Max

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e75aef8 
For #32700

Change-Id: Ib5cd7004e4558bebebc5f9e7c9263d720c590845
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/269338
Trust: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
Run-TryBot: Jay Conrod <jayconrod@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Go Bot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Bryan C. Mills <bcmills@google.com>
@bcmills
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bcmills commented Jul 30, 2021

Max was deprecated in CL 269357. At this point I don't see a pressing need to delete it, so I don't think there is anything left to do for this issue.

@bcmills bcmills closed this as completed Jul 30, 2021
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