🐛 Bug: beta versions should use semver-style dot numeric separator (instead of dash)

[AviVahl]

Bug Report Checklist

• I have read and agree to Mocha's Code of Conduct and Contributing Guidelines
• I have searched for related issues and issues with the faq label, but none matched my issue.
• I have 'smoke tested' the code to be tested by running it outside the real test suite to get a better sense of whether the problem is in the code under test, my usage of Mocha, or Mocha itself.
• I want to provide a PR to resolve this

Expected

Using caret with a beta version should pick up newer beta.

Actual

12.0.0-beta-10 is NOT matched by "^12.0.0-beta-9 (or even "^12.0.0-beta-10" 🤯 )

Minimal, Complete and Verifiable Example

mkdir semver-behavior
cd semver-behavior
npm init -y
npm pkg set type=module
npm i semver
echo "import { gt } from 'semver'; console.log('12.0.0-beta-10 > 12.0.0-beta-9', gt('12.0.0-beta-10', '12.0.0-beta-9')); console.log('12.0.0-beta.10 > 12.0.0-beta.9', gt('12.0.0-beta.10', '12.0.0-beta.9'));" > main.js
node main.js

prints:

12.0.0-beta-10 > 12.0.0-beta-9 false
12.0.0-beta.10 > 12.0.0-beta.9 true

Versions

12.0.0-beta-*

Additional Info

semver, which is used by npm and many other packages, treats - differently from .

I believe it treats dot as a separator, parsing the numeric digits after it as a number, while it treats the dash as regular alphabet, sorting 10 before 9.

Neat one, isn't it?

[mark-wiemer]

Thanks, this was an oversight, first time doing betas :)

[mark-wiemer]

Re-opening to confirm, ref #5754

[mikeasage]

Not sure this is worth fixing at this point given all the other beta versions are out there with the unfortunately undesired versions. Perhaps this should just be closed as won't fix?

[mark-wiemer]

We will keep the other versions. But if there is a future beta version it will be beta.11. However, I think the next release will be rc.1 as we are near feature-completion! However, Mocha 13-beta.1 will be here sooner than we might think :)