let’s hope you’ll never get to “-10”, because build tools would probably get that wrong (“-2" > “-10”)

pniederw: That's a good point

AFAIK build tools are capable of sorting numbers in versions as if they are numbers.

I was under the impression (though it may just be a semver thing) that sorting by number happened with the three numbers surrounding the `.`s, and everything after was treated as a string. I could be wrong though. EDIT I was wrong, see below

What source are you quoting by the way?

That's from the semver spec http://semver.org/#spec-item-11 I'm not sure how that applies to the various build tools though.

Probably semver applies to none of the relevant ones (maven, gradle)

@ilya.gorbunov I’m pretty sure maven and gradle compare anything after the hyphen lexicographically

ok, might just be ivy and gradle 🙂

Is it that one? https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/subprojects/dependency-management/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/ivyresolve/strategy/StaticVersionComparator.java

Looks like it. @pniederw Your name is all over the blame 🙂 https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blame/master/subprojects/dependency-management/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/ivyresolve/strategy/StaticVersionComparator.java

all I remember is that the goal was to remain compatible with ivy, even though we ripped out the ivy impl

It looks like it has pretty similar rules to Maven. Version parts are broken on

{'.', '_', '-'. '+'}

and boundaries between digits and non-digits, and there can be an arbitrary amount of them. https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/subprojects/dependency-management/src/main/java/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/ivyresolve/strategy/VersionParser.java

happy to be proven wrong. 🙂 I added a test to https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/subprojects/dependency-management/src/test/groovy/org/gradle/api/internal/artifacts/ivyservice/ivyresolve/strategy/DefaultVersionComparatorTest.groovy to confirm, and it indeed gets it right.