Crazy counting...

When you are keeping build/version number in strings, you really need to left pad with 0's in order for string sorting to work...

e.g. 1.0-alpha-2 > 1.0-alpha-1 > 1.0-alpha-10

So as long as we start off with a leading zero, we are fine, e.g. 1.0-alpha-01

Of course the next question is how much padding...

Eventually you will reach a point where the amount of padding is too much... enter crazy counting...

Start off with a small amount/no padding and when it looks likely that you will run out, skip versions...

With base 10, you'll probably want to start skipping somewhere around the 5-7 mark, so we'd have

1.0-alpha-1, 1.0-alpha-2, 1.0-alpha-3, 1.0-alpha-4
(hmmm we're burning a lot of alphas... looks like we might make 10 or 15, better start crazy counting)
1.0-alpha-50, 1.0-alpha-51, ... 1.0-alpha-99 and we're screwed unless we did another crazy counting...

If we thought we'd need lots more than 50 builds, we could go really crazy

1.0-alpha-4 -> 1.0-alpha-500 -> 1.0-alpha-501, etc

BTW, crazy counting is handy with Maven which uses string based comparison for qualifiers