Ordering of versions

[Glyn Normington]

The requirements document description of versioning ([1]) says:

"Version strings must be totally ordered but otherwise the module system must not impose any particular structure or semantics upon them."

Dalibor Topic's presentation on Jigsaw at EclipseCon Europe gave some interesting examples of versions supported by Jigsaw, but it wasn't clear how a total ordering could be defined that preserved the total ordering of multiple version conventions.

For example, what is the order of the following versions, where "-" is taken to delimit a qualifier: 1.2-3,1.2.1-3, 1.2.3?

Regards,
Glyn
[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/doc/draft-java-module-system-requirements-12#versioning