The rising standard in the world of web development (and others) is called »Semantic Versioning« [1], that many projects adhere to or sometimes must actively explain, why they don't.
The structure of a »semantic version« string is a set of three integers, MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, where the »sematics« part lies in a kind of contract between author and user, when to increment which part. I do _not_ suggest Unicode to embrace that standard, merely stating, that that is what many frontend developers will simply assume when looking at a version string, that matches this pattern. --Manuel [1] http://semver.org/ 2017-05-23 8:43 GMT+02:00 Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>: > On 5/22/2017 3:49 PM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote: > >> One of the objectives is to use a current version of the UCD to >> determine, for example, which characters were in Version x.y. One >> needs that for a regular expression such as [:Age=3.0:], which >> also matches all characters that have survived since Version 1.1. >> Another is to record for which versions of the standard a character had >> some particular value of a property. >> > > Richard, > > I would tend to side with those who claim that "version number" is > something that's defined by common industry practice, and therefore not > something that Unicode needs to define - but is allowed to use. Just like > Unicode doesn't define what an integer is, or hexadecimal number system or > a whole host of other concepts that are used in defining in turn what > Unicode is. > > As Markus implied, version numbers are a positional number system where > the positions in turn are integers in decimal notation, separated by dots. > > As it is neither a "string" nor a single number, neither of those common > sorting methods give the right answer, but a multi-field sort will. > > If you have a multi-field sort algorithm that uses commas as the > delimiter, just swap out the dots for commas. If not, then you have to > implement your own multi-level sort. > > In any well-designed modern runtime library you can pass a comparison > method to any of the sorting algorithms (or sorted data collections). > > A./ > > PS: somewhere in the standard, Unicode does define names for the fields: > Major, Minor and Update. The use of the term "Update" may not be universal, > but major and minor version numbers are a well established concept and do > not need a definition. The naming also implies the order of precedence. >