FWIW, here's my latest take on the problem. I also have some doubt about what a "version string" is in this context, but like you, I take, e.g., "4.2.12-7" to be a version string with four components. I also wanted to investigate the single pass, no sort approach. The following solution also retains input order a-la List::MoreUtils::uniq(). (I have no idea if these latter features are required or desired at all, but I wanted to play around with them just as an intellectual exercise.) I can't say I really like this code; three of the map statements | expressions are rather hairy (one is quite long) and I'd hate to be the one who has to maintain this code. Anyway: 

use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dump qw(dd);

use Test::More 'no_plan';
use Test::NoWarnings;

my $ver = qr{ - (\d+) [.] (\d+) [.] (\d+) - (\d+) [.] }xms;

my %latest;
my @most_recent =
    map $latest{ $_->[0] }[1] eq $_->[2] ? $_->[2] : (),
    map { $latest{$_->[0]} = [ @$_[1,2] ] if ! $latest{$_->[0]} or $la
+test{$_->[0]}[0] lt $_->[1];  $_; }
    map [ (m{ \A (.*?) $ver }xms)[0], pack('N4', m{$ver}xms), $_ ],
    map validate($_),
    map { chomp;  $_; }
    <DATA>
    ;
dd \@most_recent;

is_deeply \@most_recent,
    [ qw(
      samba-common-libs-4.2.12-7.el7_2.x86_64
      abc-4.2.11-10.el7_2.x86_64
      xyz-libs-4.2.13-7.el7_2.x86_64
      )],
    "extracted by most recent version";

done_testing;

sub validate { return $_[0]; }

# data from Marshall pm#1174121
# also added:
#   samba-common-libs-4.2.9-8.el7_2.x86_64
#   abc-4.2.11-10.el7_2.x86_64

__DATA__
samba-common-libs-4.2.12-7.el7_2.x86_64
samba-common-libs-4.2.10-3.el7_2.x86_64
xyz-libs-4.2.10-7.el7_2.x86_64
samba-common-libs-4.2.10-6.el7_2.x86_64
abc-4.2.11-7.el7_2.x86_64
samba-common-libs-4.2.9-8.el7_2.x86_64
abc-4.2.11-10.el7_2.x86_64
xyz-libs-4.2.11-7.el7_2.x86_64
abc-4.2.11-8.el7_2.x86_64
samba-common-libs-4.2.10-6.2.el7_2.x86_64
xyz-libs-4.2.12-7.el7_2.x86_64
xyz-libs-4.2.13-7.el7_2.x86_64
samba-common-libs-4.2.10-8.el7_2.x86_64

[download]
(This runs under 5.8.9.)

Output: 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks\Anonymous Monk\1173958>perl sort_by_ver_latest_3.p
+l
[
  "samba-common-libs-4.2.12-7.el7_2.x86_64",
  "abc-4.2.11-10.el7_2.x86_64",
  "xyz-libs-4.2.13-7.el7_2.x86_64",
]
ok 1 - extracted by most recent version
1..1
ok 2 - no warnings
1..2

[download]

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^6: Advanced Bubble Sort by AnomalousMonk
in thread Advanced Bubble Sort by Anonymous Monk

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