- in composer the `~` operator is just a shortcut for `~1.0` = `>=1.0.0,<2.0.0`
  it does not prevent dev versions to be installed but neither does `1.*`
- dev versions are constrolled via `minimum-stability` setting and the
  `@dev`, `@beta`, `@stable`,... settings.
- setting bower packages that ship compiled files only with the stable
  release to use `@stable` in composer.json of the applictaions. This
  setting can be removed when we remove the `minimum-stability=dev`
  setting after GA.

Improved checks where substr_compare is used, replaced more substr + comapre cases with substr_compare

reverts 45e4973a