Add a way to include all prerelease versions in a range

[acarl005]

Currently, prerelease versions can only be opted-in to for specific patch versions, e.g. the range ^3.0.0-0 will allow 3.0.0-beta.1, but not 3.1.0-beta.1. I think this is the optimal behavior for what most users expect. However, there are some use cases for allowing prereleases for everything in the range. For example, see this discussion. In this case, vite-node wraps vite and it lists vite in its dependencies. However, @sveltejs/kit also depended upon vite, but it needed a prerelease beta version. The result is that @sveltejs/kit and vite-node ended up with separate, incompatible versions, breaking my project. I ended up having to use overrides in my package.json to work around it.

It would be nice if there was a way for vite-node to specify a looser range that allows all prerelease versions.

Maybe it could be something like ^^3.0.0-0?

[ljharb]

Can’t it do ^3.0.0-0 || ^3.1.0-0 etc, as needed?

[acarl005]

Yes, that is possible. However, it means that the maintainers of vite-node need to add a version with every minor release of vite, which is burdensome.

[ljharb]

True, but that’s far less burdensome than updating the entire node ecosystem to support a new range operator.

[jwdonahue]

This seems like a discussion for the node issues site. SemVer, does not currently define range specs, though that is a WIP, but it's primarily meant to document the most common factors between a small set of existing tools that each have their own range spec semantics.

[ljharb]

Oh, my mistake, I thought this issue was filed on npm/semver. This spec doesn't have ranges at all, so I totally agree it's entirely off topic.