BUG: _compare_version backward incompat

cc @hoechenberger:

>>> import mne
>>> mne.fixes._compare_version('1.0.dev0', '>=', '1.0')
False
>>> from distutils.version import LooseVersion
>>> LooseVersion('1.0.dev0') >= LooseVersion('1.0')
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: distutils Version classes are deprecated. Use packaging.version instead.
True

This is a problem because we usually want the second result 😦

The git grep check_version | wc -l count is 67 and git grep _compare_version | wc -l is 26, I’d rather not have to change all of these to allow for .dev0 extensions. Plus other submodules like mne-nirs that already use this (where I saw the problem actually!) will not work properly…

I’m tempted to change this to cut off any .dev from the end to make life easy, but then we depart from standard. But it seems a bit like the lesser of two evils here.

[cbrnr]

So maybe we should add loose=True to check_version, do the stripping there, and not change _compare_version (and just fix the way fewer of those we use, where needed).

This sounds good!

[cbrnr]

So this would basically affect equality comparisons, right? Using loose=True would mean that 1.0.dev0 >= 1.0, 1.0.dev0 <= 1.0, and 1.0.dev0 == 1.0 are all True. Does this make sense? I don’t really understand why we rely on such strange comparisons.