Ability to configure version prefix

[hohwille]

As a devonfw-ide user, I want to use latest security fixes of tools but still be in control of e.g. major version so that my project team can work reliable but also up-to-date with minimum maintenance effort.

So e.g. for my project I might want to decide for Java 11. However, whilst using Java 11, I would like to have always the latest version available for Java 11. Currently there is no option to configure this:

• Either I leave JAVA_VERSION unconfigured and once a new (even non LTS, kind of experimental) release gets available, my team will get it and things break
• Or I have to configure JAVA_VERSION to the exact version number to the last digit.

Therefore, the idea is that I can set e.g. JAVA_VERSION=11* or JAVA_VERSION=11.0*.
Then, with this story being implemented, devonfw-ide would notice that this from the asterisk in the version.
Therefore, devonfw-ide (doInstall) would choose the first version from available-versions starting with the given version but not immediately followed by a digit. So JAVA_VERSION=11* would match 11.0.16.1_1 but not 111.2.3.

This slightly relates to issue #878

[hohwille]

I have done some more thinking about this and came to the following concern:

There may be a tool X with versions such as 11 and 11.1. Now if I set X_VERSION=11 it would be ambiguous if I want to have exactly version 11 or the latest 11* version. So it would be better to change this story in a way to avoid such ambiguity.
Therefore we should either add * as suffix to a version variable value in order to activate this feature or to end with a separator (11. would match 11.1 but 11 would only match 11 - but then also other separators such as - would need to be supported as well). Therefore IMHO using * as the common glob matching character would be the easiest but still most consistent solution.
In case of Java it might be slightly more intuitive for users to simply write JAVA_VERSION=11 than JAVA_VERSION=11* (and with * we have to be careful to avoid accidental bash globbing) but as a generic solution this makes the most sense to me and also it seems to be quite explicit and readable as 11* is obviously not a version but means 11 followed by anything (where the first character of "anything" is not a digit).

FYI: With this way it is easy for doInstall to detect if this feature is used (version ends with *) or not. If not the version does not even have to be contained in available-versions e.g. if a project wants to use a filtered version (e.g. release-candidate) of a tool on purpose. This should also still be supported and otherwise all this would be complicated as we do not easily know if the version is complete or only a prefix that needs to be resolved to a complete version by matching from available-versions.

[hohwille]

Works but needs some special cases to be considered:

*** Setting up eclipse ***
You are using eclipse version 2022-06 that requires Java 11 or newer.
However, [EXTRA_]JAVA_VERSION is 11* - in this setup eclipse can not work.
Please update JAVA_VERSION, set EXTRA_JAVA_VERSION or downgrade ECLIPSE_VERSION in your settings/devon.properties!

Do you want to continue?
(yes/no): yes

[hohwille]

Works but needs some special cases to be considered:

Fixed with latest commit.