chore: release script needs to support publishing with either next or latest tags #11873
Description
Proposal
What is the expected behavior?
We need to be able to publish RC releases using the next tag on NPM.
What is the current behavior?
We can only publish via the default npm publish behavior which always uses the latest tag on NPM. This means that developers who want the latest stable release, will instead get the RC if it's the last thing we've published.
What is the use-case or motivation for changing an existing behavior?
Given the fact that we no longer sync with g3 or have the full set of Google presubmit tests run against the library for each commit, we want to start doing RC releases to give developers an opportunity to report regressions before we publish the release to everyone.
Is there anything else we should know? Stack Traces, Screenshots, etc.
We currently have some parsing in the release.js script to identify if a version string includes an RC section. But we don't give the person doing the release an option to pick the release tag. We should probably offer next and latest (default) as options and also allow a free-form tag entry.