The versiontheca library is used to compile versions of various types in a list of parts.The library supports traits, which are various implementations of the version parser. The default is the Unicode trait. This version parser supports pretty much all the Unicode characters. The period is viewed as a part separator and like most of the other parsers, it views strings of digits as number, opposed to a string, which is important for sorting versions in an ascending order.

All the traits are:

• Basic – allow for numbers separated by periods (.) only
• Debian – allow for Debian like versions to be parsed (Debian, Ubuntu)
• Decimal – a basic version with just two numbers, so it can be converted to a floating point number
• roman – allow for roman numerals to appear in a part
• RPM – allow RPM like versions to be parsed (Fedora, RedHat)
• Unicode – allow any character in your version, numbers are still viewed as such and ordered as numbers, not strings

Note

The implementation for the Debian and RPM version traits do not match the corresponding distribution implementations. However, for most common versions, it should work as expected. Only a very few packages temporarily use versions that may fail.

At this time, the source code and support is found on Github.com: https://github.com/m2osw/versiontheca