A quick post today to tell you about a recent discovery in Git’s sorting functions and tags based on semantic versioning.
By default, if you run the git tag -l command, Git will do an alphabetical sort.
However, this sorting gives confusing results when the tags use semantic versioning notation.
git tag -l
v2.6.1
v2.6.10
v2.6.11
v2.6.12
v2.6.2
v2.6.3
v2.6.4
v2.6.5
v2.6.6
v2.6.7
v2.6.8
v2.6.9
v2.7.0
Notice here the sequence v2.6.10, v2.6.11 and v2.6.12 which is interposed between version v2.6.1 and v2.6.2.
To solve this problem, it is possible to use the --sort function with the version attribute in Git.
git tag --sort=version:refname
This will display the sorted results consistently:
git tag --sort=version:refname
v2.6.1
v2.6.2
v2.6.3
v2.6.4
v2.6.5
v2.6.6
v2.6.7
v2.6.8
v2.6.9
v2.6.10
v2.6.11
v2.6.12
v2.7.0