Semver Bump

Pick the current version and the kind of increment, and the page applies the semantic versioning rules. The case that usually surprises people is the prerelease: when the current version is something like 1.2.3-rc.1, a patch bump returns 1.2.3, not 1.2.4 — because the prerelease was already reserving that number, and releasing is precisely dropping the suffix.

The full rule follows what npm's semver does. Major increments except when minor and patch are already zero and a prerelease exists; minor increments except when patch is zero and a prerelease exists; patch increments except when a prerelease exists. In every case the build metadata is dropped, because semver does not treat it as part of the version's identity.

Worth recalling the precedence rule, which is what makes sense of all this: a version with a prerelease comes BEFORE the same version without one, so 1.0.0-rc.1 is less than 1.0.0. That is why a range like caret followed by 1.0.0 matches no prerelease by default — anyone wanting to test a candidate has to ask for it explicitly.