Incorrectly produces error when installed has prerelease tag and any version expected

[tomi]

I have a package which has a prerelease tag in its version: 0.1.2-snapshot.125. In package.json any version (*) is accepted. This is incorrectly marked as an error.

package-name: installed: 0.1.2-snapshot.125, expected: *

[mgol]

Thanks for the report.

This behaves exactly as in the semver package:

const semver = require('semver');
semver.satisfies("1.2.3", "*"); // true
semver.satisfies("1.2.3-beta.1", "*"); // false

The rationale is that by default version ranges should assume people want stable versions of packages; if you want to allow pre-release ones, you need to be explicit and even being explicit that you want to accept 1.0.0-beta doesn't mean 1.0.1-beta gets accepted:

const semver = require('semver');
semver.satisfies("1.0.0-beta.1", ">=1.0.0-beta"); // true
semver.satisfies("1.0.1-beta.1", ">=1.0.0-beta"); // false

That said, if you have * as a version range in package.json, npm install installs the pre-release version if none other is available and doesn't even print any warning (at least with npm 4.2.0). So relaxing that requirement sounds reasonable.

Would you like to submit a PR?

[tomi]

Unfortunately at this point I don't have the time to do a PR