Add special "ready" prerelease option

.ado/get-next-semver-version.js

@@ -10,16 +10,14 @@ function getNextVersion(patchVersionPrefix) {
 
     const prerelease = semver.prerelease(releaseVersion);
 
-    if (!prerelease) {
+    if (!prerelease || prerelease[0] === 'ready') {
       if (patchVersionPrefix) {
         releaseVersion = semver.inc(releaseVersion, 'prerelease', patchVersionPrefix);
       }
       else {
-      releaseVersion = semver.inc(releaseVersion, 'patch');
+        releaseVersion = semver.inc(releaseVersion, 'patch');
       }
-    }
-
-    if (prerelease) {
+    } else {
       releaseVersion = semver.inc(releaseVersion, 'prerelease');
       if (patchVersionPrefix) {
         releaseVersion = releaseVersion.replace(`-${prerelease[0]}.`, `-${prerelease[0]}-${patchVersionPrefix}.`);

docs/Releases.md

@@ -69,5 +69,17 @@ The Publish flow does the following:
       3. Call `prepare-package-for-release` to bump versions, tag the commit, and push to git
       4. Call `publish-npm` to publish to NPM the version that was just tagged. 
 4. Generate the correct NPM `dist-tag` and publish to NPM
-5. Commit all changed files and push back to Github 
+5. Commit all changed files and push back to Github
 
+### Publishing New Versions
+
+Each minor version publishes out of its own branch (e.g., 0.71-stable for react-native-macos 0.71.x). In order to ensure initial releases are properly versioned, we have a special prerelease name called `ready`. This will tell our `get-next-semver-version` script that we're ready to release the next version.
+
+We do this so that our first release will have a proper patch version of 0, as shown by this snippet from an interactive Node.js console:
+
+```js
+> semver.inc('0.72.0', 'patch')
+'0.72.1' // Not ideal
+> semver.inc('0.72.0-ready', 'patch')
+'0.72.0' // Better!
+```