Pluggable Version and Milestone Sorter

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

The current version and milestone sorting is rather generic.

However, it fails on correctly sorting versions such as 1.0.0proto_stable and 1.0.0proto_alpha, 1.0.0alpha_stable, 1.0.0beta_proto.

These, at least in my world, should be sorted as follows

1.0.0proto_alpha 1.0.0proto_stable 1.0.0alpha_stable 1.0.0beta_stable

The same is true for milestones implementing a similar naming scheme.

What I propose is to allow the user to plug-in both sorters for milestones and versions and make this available as extension points, with the default behaviour being either hard coded into the existing components or externalized as default implementations of these interface.

I already did some work on this and the existing system seems to work, but will fail on input that does not match the sorter's production scheme, i.e. it will raise an exception thus preventing lists from being displayed. So additional work must be invested.

In addition, these sorters should also be able to reverse sort the input based on an additional parameter.

[Remy Blank]

That's an additional complexity that I would prefer to avoid. The current sorting, while imperfect, works well enough for most cases.

One vote for "wontfix".

[Christian Boos]

I see a connection with FieldRefactoring, though. We can't be sure to find a sorting order that would fit for any kind of custom field, so if we make it possible to define a sort order for custom fields, we may as well do the same for "standard" fields.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to cboos:

We can't be sure to find a sorting order that would fit for any kind of custom field, …

There was even a ticket for that: #3080. Closing as duplicate.

[anonymous]

The default sorting of versions doesn't fit to our needs as well - in our company we like to order it alphabetically.

I also found a defect of sorting milestones - it sorts first lower cases and then uppercase. For example trac does: a, b, c, A, B, C instead of a, A, b, B, c, C

I already solved these two issues in a Component, see ​http://trac-hacks.org/browser/ticketnavplugin/0.12/ticketnav/ticketnav.py#L415

More infos see at ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TicketNavPlugin#ComponentSortMilestoneVersion