Jira (PUP-4780) enhance versioncmp() error checking as it only accepts strings

[Henrik Lindberg (JIRA)]

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Henrik Lindberg commented on PUP-4780   Re: enhance versioncmp() error checking as it only accepts strings The 3.x API requires some transformations to be made to values, but it never transforms integers and floats. In 4.x integer and float literals are immediately turned into Integer and Float instances by the lexer whereas in 3.x they became strings. In 3.x. the values were type converted to integer or float if arithmetic were performed on the values. Thus you get exactly the same problem in 3.x if you were to do this: $foo = 5.43 + 0.0 versioncmp($foo, "5.43") or $foo = "5.43" + 0.0 versioncmp($foo, "5.43") Also note that the 3.x "sense of datatype" is not really to be trusted, the function type3x answers float / integer for strings that can be converted to the corresponding decimal (decimal, because it will not consider "0xffff" to be an integer, nor "0777") numerical representation and then back again to a string yielding the exact same string. In 4.x there is a stdlib function type_of that returns the 4.x type. It is also easy to test with =~ e.g. if $foo =~ Float { notice 'it is a float' } else { notice "It is a ${type_of($foo)}" } The change in Puppet is deliberate "Numbers are Numbers", and the input should be changed to a string by quoting it. In fact; quote all bare word numbers that are intended to be used as strings. I am modifying this ticket to be for enhancing the versioncmp function (by moving it to the 4.x function API) and typing its parameters. The result will be that it immediately flags it as an error to feed the function anything but String values. This change is however API breaking and cannot be done until puppet 5 (because it can then no longer be called via scope using the 3.x calling convention from within templates and other functions). We can add argument type checking in the 3.x function as a stop gap solution in 4.x. and also update the documentation of the function to clearly state that it only accepts strings. One open end remains in what was reported; if there are facts/utilities that set floating point values instead of string values, they should be modified to produce a value of the correct data type. Add Comment   This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.3.15#6346-sha1:dbc023d) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-bugs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to puppet-bugs@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.