The end year is legally and functionally redundant, and more importantly causes
cherry-pick conflicts when trying to maintain old branches. Use git for history.
In 1de7cc we checked the version format when checking for update, but there are
many other places that are doing verfmt-insensitive comparisons. For instance,
the predicates in <requires> all fail if the device version format is plain.
his breaks updating some NVMe drives where the `ne` requirements are not
semantic versions.
To avoid trying to catch all the bugs in different places, and in case we have
a future verfmt that should be treated another way, refactor this out in to a
common function and deprecate the old function.
