Generic implementation of version comparison.
Features:
- mixing of '
-' (dash) and '.' (dot) separators,
- transition between characters and digits also constitutes a separator:
1.0alpha1 => [1, 0, alpha, 1]
- unlimited number of version components,
- version components in the text can be digits or strings,
- strings are checked for well-known qualifiers and the qualifier ordering is used for version ordering.
Well-known qualifiers (case insensitive) are:
snapshot
alpha or a
beta or b
milestone or m
rc or cr
(the empty string) or ga or final
sp
Unknown qualifiers are considered after known qualifiers, with lexical order (always case insensitive),
- a dash usually precedes a qualifier, and is always less important than something preceded with a dot.