Support custom tags

[kettanaito]

It'd be nice to give an option to publish a certain version under a custom tag (i.e. "beta"). Right now, all versions are published with the "latest" tag.

[kettanaito]

Proposal

Usage

release publish --tag beta

Release version

Running pubilsh with the custom tag value will still calculate the next release version based on the commits you have, and create the next release version in this format:

• Given previous published version: 1.2.3.
• And the following commit: feat: new stuff.
• It'd use the next release version: 1.3.0-beta.

[jbcpollak]

If you go this route, I would suggest --prerelease as the flag because that's what semver calls it.

[jbcpollak]

A beta release might have the following change made to the config file:

module.exports = {
    script: "npm release",
    prerelease: "beta"
};

In this case, semrel is calculated as normal assuming it is up-to-date with all versions already released.

Releases here use regular semrel rules, but add an incrementing -beta.X if a matching semrel tag already exists.

For example: 0.1.1 -> 0.1.2-beta.1 -> 0.1.2-beta.2, but if you then commit a feature, the next release will be 0.2.0-beta-1.

I kind of prefer the use of a config setting over a CICD pipeline change, because those can often be hard to hunt down and might have additional process around changing them.

[kettanaito]

I think "prerelease" (as in "treat breaking changes as minor") and custom tags like "beta" are two separate things, which should also be configured separately.

For example.

module.exports = {
  script: '...',
  releaseType: 'prerelease'
}

This releases breaking as x.Y.x but uses latest as the release tag.

Adding a custom tag option/configuration property could complement this behavior, or be a standalone thing.

release publish --tag beta

My reasoning for putting tag into the inline option is that you never want to release your software as beta as a default tag. The default should still be latest because that's what NPM pulls in. Nothing stops you from having two ossjs.release configs, I suppose, where one would have tag: 'beta' hard-coded, and then use release publish -c ossjs.release.beta.config.js or something.

Not sure to which extent I want to make this customizable. --tag is an escape hatch to explicitly publish a version under a tag. I'd expect this to be called manually, and to be a conscious choice.