Support non-latest npm dist tags

[noahnu]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently we publish with tag=latest, are there use cases where we want to specify some other tag? Pre-release?

Describe the solution you'd like

Unclear.

[noahnu]

Is this required outside of pre-release? (@fmal thoughts?)

[fmal]

@noahnu personally i can't think of any common use case other than prereleases (via alpha, beta, next, rc tags and so on), maybe something like experimental where you could test experimental stuff that doesn't even get merged with the latest but i haven't had a need for anything like that

[noahnu]

Will close this out then. We can always re-open it.

[etimberg]

An interesting thought on this topic. I've used next as the dist tag for alpha and beta releases in libraries that I maintain.

One thing that might be nice would be a way to remove these tags when latest is published (or publish both latest and next at the same time). NPM sadly doesn't do this by default, so if you start with latest pointing to v2.5.0 and next pointing to v2.6.0-rc.1, when you publish v2.6.0 as latest, next will be incorrect until another pre-release is published.

[noahnu]

We're doing the same thing currently in monodeploy, i.e. allowing the tags to get out of sync.

I do wonder if deleting the "next" tag might create confusion -- or have any other unintended consequences.

Keeping the pre-release tag in sync with next is an interesting idea.