Only publish stable version to "latest" dist-tag

Run the following and see what is going wrong with TS package on npm:

npm info typescript
npm dist-tag ls typescript
# only one dist-tag: latest which points to alpha release..
# so when I run:
#
# npm install typescript
#
# it installs alpha version!

If you are the person having access to publish TypeScript npm package, please consider running the following commands to remedy it:

# optionally cd into/typescript-source-directory
npm dist-tag add typescript@1.4.1 latest
npm dist-tag add typescript@1.5.0-alpha alpha

Once the issue is fixed, in future to publish beta (for example 1.5.0-beta), run:

npm publish --tag=beta

For stable, it would be just a matter of:

npm publish  # only run this for stable releases. thank you!

So, as a consumer, I will run:

npm install typescript
# which is same as
npm install typescript@latest

to install stable version and:

npm install typescript@alpha
# or
npm install typescript@beta
# or even @rc, @rc1, @rc2 ..

to install respective preview build.

Note alpha, beta, rc are alphabetically sorted. And semver do consider alphabetic order (in many cases) in tag part of version:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<tag>

Which means, you can release *-preview after *-canary, but not the other way around. Better stick with *-alpha, *-beta, *-rc etc.

Note 2: dist-tags are indepenedent of GH tags. So you can have like beta1, beta2, rc8 etc. in your GH, and keep publishing to @beta tag on npm. This way, as a user I will only need to remember the generic distribution channer name alpha, beta etc. and use it so: npm install typescript@beta or in package.json: "typescript": "alpha".

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/dist-tag

Keywords: love-semver, adapt-semver, semver-rocks, semver-get-ready, I-trust-semver

[mhegazy]

thanks @jasonwilliams200OK for the feedback. this issue has been discussed in #2650. We will consider adding tags as we ship newer versions.

Thanks @mhegazy, and sorry for the dup. :)