Allow the creation of prereleases above `v1.0`

[henworth]

Thanks for stopping by to let us know something could be better!

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

Currently it seems creating prerelease versions above 1.0 are not allowed. I believe this line is responsible for preventing that. I'm curious if this is intended or if the maintainers would be willing to allow this behavior.

My workflow creates a prerelease for integration testing, for which a image is built and pushed to that environment. Once those tests are successful we promote it by changing the GitHub prerelease to a full release. This process worked fine until a repo reached v1.0.0 after which I observed Release Please was no longer creating prereleases and pipelines started breaking.

Describe the solution you'd like

Provide a way for Release Please to respect prerelease: true irrespective of the released version.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I have considered a prerelease versioning strategy, but that would require extra effort to add and remove versioning strings or relabel container images. That very well might work but is less clean (in my opinion) than what was previously working just fine.

Additional context

None.

[maximzavadskiy]

Seems to work for me using CLI at least, just created [chore(main): release release-please 2.0.0-rc](https://github.com/maximzavadskiy/test-release-please/actions/runs/9959384646)

release-please-config.json:

{
  "packages": {
    ".": {
      "changelog-path": "CHANGELOG.md",
      "release-type": "node",
      "prerelease-type": "rc",
      "bump-minor-pre-major": false,
      "bump-patch-for-minor-pre-major": false,
      "draft": false,
      "prerelease": true,
      "versioning": "prerelease"
    }
  },
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googleapis/release-please/main/schemas/config.json"
}

[jcazallasc]

Any news on this? I have the same situation. I would expect to have a prerelease Release when I set "prerelease": true (which is pretty obvious) regardless of what the version is.