Major Description
There is a powerful version matcher in Ivy code base called PatternVersionMatcher. Unfortunately, this matcher is not documented, not tested, and not declared in the default typedef.properties. Nobody remembers where it comes from, but code analysis should be enough to understand how it works and what it can achieve.
Here's what I understand from a quick analysis:
settings.xml
<pattern-vm> <match revision="micro" pattern="${major}\.${minor}\.\d+" args="major, minor" matcher="regexp" /> </pattern-vm>
ivy.xml
<dependency org="acme" name="foo" rev="micro(1, 3)" />
If I understand correctly the code, this will match any revision like 1.3.<any number>.