Confusion regarding branch versions

[sk-tjdownes]

In issue #631 it was stated

we recommend running semver only on the main branch.

Is this still the case?

I would like to get some clarification here, because I am pretty confused, and nothing about this is covered in the documentation.

In semantic versioning, it's common to have version tags for the main branch and the development branch. In fact, I have over 30 projects using semantic release, all of these work flawlessly with versioning for both main and next branches. Overall, this seems to be a very common scenario, and the behavior I expected from this package. Especially since it's not documented in the README at all that the recommendation is only to version the production branch.

To add more confusion, I have a mono repo that currently only has one package. Currently, the configuration for semver lives in the package's project.json, not the root. It functions perfectly when versioning main and next.

However, the current project I am working on implements the configuration in the workspace project.json. The versioning works fine with the next branch but always versions main as 0.0.1.

Why bother having releaseAs=prerelease if both branches can't be versioned? It's all very confusing to me, and I'd love to get some clarification before I do anymore guessing. Thanks!

I believe this package could benefit from calculating releases based on git history instead of tags, like semantic release does. This would be far more reliable and accurate, as tags are easy to modify/change, whereas history is much more stable.