How does maven sort version numbers?

Question

Maven seems to have the ability to indicate a range of versions such as [1.2.3,) how does maven figure out what is a newer or old

Answer 1

This is a test that was written directly against the ComparableVersion class from Maven.

package org.codehaus.mojo.buildhelper.versioning;

import org.apache.maven.artifact.versioning.ComparableVersion;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;

public class TempTest {
    @Test
    public void testVersions() {
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-beta1-SNAPSHOT").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-beta1")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-beta1").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-beta2-SNAPSHOT")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-beta2-SNAPSHOT").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-rc1-SNAPSHOT")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-rc1-SNAPSHOT").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-rc1")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-rc1").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-SNAPSHOT")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-SNAPSHOT").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1")) == 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-sp")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-sp").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0-whatever")) < 0);
        Assert.assertTrue(new ComparableVersion("1.0-whatever").compareTo(
                new ComparableVersion("1.0.1")) < 0);
    }
}

This test asserts that the following versions are considered to be from lowest to highest by Maven:

• 1.0-beta1-SNAPSHOT
• 1.0-beta1
• 1.0-beta2-SNAPSHOT
• 1.0-rc1-SNAPSHOT
• 1.0-rc1
• 1.0-SNAPSHOT
• 1.0 and 1 (these are equal)
• 1.0-sp
• 1.0-whatever
• 1.0.1