w.r.t the above I did find https://github.com/osquery/osquery/issues/5196 and this lead me on a 🐰 🕳️ of related PR's ending at https://github.com/osquery/osquery/pull/6535 which is what I suspect @seph was referring to 🤔

I’ve written a couple PRs, and ultimately closed them all. At this point, I think it would be reasonable to either: Import a version comparison library, I found an MIT license header-only one. Being header-only it’s probably better than I can write. Write a simple string compare. I think I now see the correct algorithm for it. Essentially, start comparing strings from the left in, and exit the loop when there’s a discrepancy. Some open question about how to handle dpkg special characters.