RFC: Publish set the tag accordingly to the semver version number

[theoludwig]

Currently : Versions numbers have no direct connection with dist-tags.
It should be possible to run npm publish without specifying the --tag argument, instead it will pick the tag based on the semver version number (inside package.json).

Examples of various versions values inside package.json

16.0.3 release the package attached to the latest tag
16.0.3-tagname.1 release the package attached to the tagname tag
16.0.3-beta.1 release the package attached to the beta tag

References

• Initial discussion in npm/feedback : npm publish and tag releases feedback#194
• Issue on yarnpkg about the same feature : [Feature] yarn npm publish set the tag accordingly to the version number yarnpkg/berry#2444
• Mutability of the latest tag discussion : Mutability of the `latest` tag feedback#109

[ljharb]

An alternative might be a new config value that opts in to this behavior, that then the project could put in its .npmrc - then there's no surprises for existing authors, but there's an ergonomic path to this behavior for those that know about it.

[wesleytodd]

Just to document another thing I hope we could change related to dist-tags. If --save-exact was used when installing a dist-tag specifier, it would be great if that saved the exact value. So npm i --save-exact foo@next would result in "foo": "next" in the package.json.

Ended up discussing this on the call, and if we opt'd for a --save-spec that would work as well to avoid the breaking change.