release: npm tags "latest" and "next" are not consistent

[christophercr]

I'm submitting a...

[ ] Regression (a behavior that used to work and stopped working in a new release)
[X] Bug report  
[ ] Feature request
[ ] Documentation issue or request
[ ] Support request => Please do not submit support request here, instead see https://github.com/NationalBankBelgium/stark/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#got-a-question-or-problem

Current behavior

After releasing a new version of Stark packages, the "latest" and "next" tag are inconsistent: the "next" tag shows a previous version than the "latest". The reason is that the "next" tag is the version generated by the nightly build.

Expected behavior

The "next" version should always be higher than the "latest" (or the same right after a new version is released).

Minimal reproduction of the problem with instructions

Release a new version of Stark and check the versions in NPM.

What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior?

Other information

Previously, in Stark 9 we managed this by changing manually the package.json to set the next version right after a new release.

However this will not work anymore since we have release-it to automate the release process and change the package.json with the released version. Moreover, that tool will also "calculate" the version to be released: major, minor or patch version.

So if we change the package.json ourselves then:

• we will throw away the automatic version "calculation" that release-it does based on the commit history.
• release-it will complain the next time we want to release because the version already exists.

[christophercr]

As we discussed, maybe an option would be to change the nightly build script to set a version which would be less specific but still meaningful like this:

10-alpha.4-commitHash => major version + alpha/beta pre-version if any + commit hash

Now that I think more about it... could we set the date instead of the commit hash? In that way it will be easier to identify the nightly builds in case someone wants to pick one from a specific date.

[christophercr]

It happened again on the latest release:

[SuperITMan]

Linked to #420

[christophercr]

Closed in #1185