search: do not sort results by stars on client side

Once upon a time, there was a website named ["The Docker index"][2]; a complimentary
service for users of Docker, provided by dotCloud. The Docker Index was the place
to find and explore pre-made container images, and allowed you to [share your
images and download them][1]. The Docker Index evolved rapidly, and gained new
features, such as [Trusted Images][3], and "stars" to rank your favorite images.

The website also provided an API, which allowed you to search images, even from
the comfort of your `docker` CLI. Things moved fast in container-land, and while
there was an API to use, it was still a work in progress. While the Docker Index
allowed users to "star" images, the search API did not rank results accordingly.

As any engineer knows, there's no problem that can't be solved with some elbow-
grease and a piece of Duct tape, so while the Docker Index team worked on making
the search API better, the `docker` engine [fixed the problem on the client side][4]

Years went by, and the Docker Index API became the "registry V1" specification,
including search. The registry got a major "v2" rewrite and became the [OCI Distribution
Spec][5], and Docker Index became Docker Hub, which included V2 and V3 search APIs.
The V1 search API continued to be supported, as it was the only documented API
for registries, but improvements were made, including ranking of search results.

Duct tape is durable, and even though improvements were made, the Docker client
continued to sort the results as well. Unfortunately, this meant that search
results on the command-line were ranked different from their equivalent on the
registry (such as Docker Hub).

This patch removes the client-side sorting of results, using the order in which
the search API returned them to (finally) celebrate the work of the engineers
working on the search API, also when used from the command-line.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130708004229/http://docker.io/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130623223614/https://index.docker.io/
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140208001647/https://index.docker.io/
[4]: 1669b802cc
[5]: https://github.com/opencontainers/distribution-spec

Signed-off-by: Sebastiaan van Stijn <github@gone.nl>
This commit is contained in:
Sebastiaan van Stijn 2022-02-26 10:54:25 +01:00
parent 55cb22de36
commit 831704e56c
No known key found for this signature in database
GPG Key ID: 76698F39D527CE8C
1 changed files with 0 additions and 4 deletions

View File

@ -2,7 +2,6 @@ package registry
import (
"context"
"sort"
"github.com/docker/cli/cli"
"github.com/docker/cli/cli/command"
@ -75,9 +74,6 @@ func runSearch(dockerCli command.Cli, options searchOptions) error {
return err
}
sort.Slice(results, func(i, j int) bool {
return results[j].StarCount < results[i].StarCount
})
searchCtx := formatter.Context{
Output: dockerCli.Out(),
Format: NewSearchFormat(options.format),