Nah, this was never really about lexicographic sorting. Pre-semver, there was general consensus between systems like dpkg and RPM about how version numbers worked. This is a bit of a simplification, but it roughly works out like this:
* Split version number into version numbers separated by non-alphanumeric components (e.g., 3.10.2 becomes (3,10,2) and 3.2 becomes (3,2)).
* Compare two versions item by item numerically (in this case, 3==3 but 10 > 2 so 3.10.2 is newer than 3.2).
Source: long ago I worked at a company named Ximian that shipped a software update product that worked on systems using both RPM and dpkg, and I had to deeply understand this problem space.
