the npm publish step of the release process will use a "latest" dist-tag for a pre-release and should not

[trentm]

I did a 4.0.0-rc.1 release recently. The resulting npm published package was dist-tagged with "latest":

% npm info elastic-apm-node dist-tags
{ latest: '4.0.0-rc.1', '2x': '2.17.3' }

The intent is that it does not mark a pre-release (a version with a hyphen in it) as "latest". I had played with https://www.npmjs.com/package/@trentm/npmplay and got the wrong impression that a bare npm publish would do the "right" thing (at least what I wanted). However, that isn't the case.

Proposal: have a "dev-utils/npm-publish.sh" that does the equivalent handling of dist-tagging that is done in "push-docker.sh" and "github-release.sh". As a bonus, we could possibly have it handle the "latest-" explicitly dist-tagging for non-latest-major maintenance branches, i.e. for the current "3.x" branch.