There is a difference b/w a prerelease tag associated to a package version (https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/semver#prerelease-tags) and a package's distribution tag upon publish (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/dist-tag#purpose).
Thus, given the URL schemas dictated by https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#git-urls-as-dependencies it be possible to publish an npm package with both a prerelease tag on a version and a distribution tag to give two options for targetting within a library
The RFC behind the new semver notation specifies just a prerelease tag.
It be worthwhile to publish some sort of distribbution tag to avoid clobbering the default latest
tag that npm
uses