Resolve "Sample discovery fails for certain paths"

Release notes

fixed sample discovery failing if certain characters like '-' appeared at particular levels of a folder structure

Details

not a full fix but at least making it work reliably. We will need to re-write a small section here properly at some point. Also includes a few fixes for the CI to account for changes in lsetup root and a small patch when running with python versions that are release candidates (version numbers like 2.7.15rc1 which are not correctly treated by StrictVersion ...)

Closes #4 (closed)