Consider migrating from `LooseVersion` to `packaging.version.Version`

[jfgrimm]

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The official replacement for distutils.LooseVersion (the code for which we ingested into EasyBuild) is packaging.version.LooseVersion. Unfortunately, it's currently a third-party package. Of course, we could always do the same as what we did with LooseVersion, and duplicate the necessary code in EasyBuild...

From a quick look, there are some differences in behaviour:

• unable to compare a Version object against a string (so need to use e.g. Version(X) >= Version(Y) instead of LooseVersion(x) >= Y)
• stripping "superfluous" zeros in version numbers (e.g. Version('8.02') == Version('8.2'))
• better parsing and handling of pre-/post releases etc (e.g. Version('2.0.beta1') < Version('2.0'))
• more intuitive handling of a leading 'v' in versions (e.g. Version('2.0') > Version('v1.0'))
• flat rejecting some "invalid" versions (e.g. Version('w1.0') or Version('1.')) (probably not an exhaustive list)

Largely, I would say the behaviour is more intuitive, but would certainly require a careful look through easyblocks if we did transition to it.