renovate/docs/usage/modules/versioning.md

Versioning

Once Managers have extracted dependencies, and Datasources have located available versions, then Renovate will use a "Versioning" scheme to perform sorting and filtering of results. The "versioning" is different for each package manager, because different package managers use different versioning schemes. For example, npm uses1.0.0-beta.1 and pip uses 1.0.0b1.

Configuring Versioning

You can manually configure/override the versioning value for a particular dependency. You generally won't need to override the defaults for ecosystems which enforce a strict version scheme like npm. Configuring or overriding the default versioning can be helpful for ecosystems like Docker, where versioning is barely a "convention". e.g.

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchDatasources": ["docker"],
      "matchPackageNames": ["python"],
      "versioning": "pep440"
    }
  ]
}

The above will override Renovate's default of docker versioning for the python Docker image and instead use pep440 versioning to evaluate versions.

Supported Versioning