Proposed Version Schemes
Numeric Portion
Legal/Rational Versions can consist of any number of digits with dots as a field separator. The last field may have alphabetic characters. Proposals for those are explained below.
The sorting of the numeric digits is made by separating the numbers into fields and comparing each number separately. If a version does not have as many fields as the version being compared to, those fields sort before the version that contains a number (even if that number is 0).
Examples:
1.1 > 1.0 1.0.0 > 1.0 1.0.1 > 1.0.0.1000
Alphabetic Portion
The last field may contain non numeric characters
Proposal 1
They sort in lexographic order. These are always post releases
Examples:
1.1a > 1.1 1.1zz > 1.1a
Proposal 2
They sort in lexographic order except for the following special names.
- alpha
- beta
- rc
The special names can have a trailing number.
Those are considered pre-releases and sort before the related numbers.
Examples:
1.1alpha1 1.1alpha2 1.1beta 1.1beta1 1.1rc1 1.1 1.1a 1.1b 1.1c