fix: don't try to deprecate nonexistant versions

[wraithgar]

If you pass npm a version that doesn't exist, it still tries to PUT the
packument but with no changes. This is unneccessary and currently
results in a 422 error from the npm registry

[ljharb]

awesome! what will the error output be when no versions exist?

[nlf]

i had the same question as @ljharb, it doesn't feel like the best interaction to just silently do nothing if there's no matching version either. it would be better to throw an error telling the user there were no matching published versions, or at least log a warning

[npm-cli-bot]

no statistically significant performance changes detected

timing results

app-large	clean	lock-only	cache-only	cache-only peer-deps	modules-only	no-lock	no-cache	no-modules	no-clean	no-clean audit
npm@8	43.000 ±6.73	15.065 ±0.10	13.887 ±0.12	16.322 ±0.90	2.625 ±0.01	2.608 ±0.01	2.113 ±0.04	9.915 ±0.03	2.137 ±0.03	3.433 ±0.39
#6050	36.359 ±0.97	14.937 ±0.05	13.863 ±0.01	16.371 ±0.90	2.595 ±0.01	2.638 ±0.10	2.023 ±0.01	9.698 ±0.04	2.031 ±0.02	3.251 ±0.11

app-medium	clean	lock-only	cache-only	cache-only peer-deps	modules-only	no-lock	no-cache	no-modules	no-clean	no-clean audit
npm@8	28.305 ±0.96	11.918 ±0.02	10.876 ±0.00	11.702 ±0.06	2.406 ±0.01	2.390 ±0.01	2.176 ±0.05	7.466 ±0.06	2.077 ±0.00	2.857 ±0.02
#6050	27.187 ±3.00	11.704 ±0.01	10.769 ±0.03	11.878 ±0.33	2.386 ±0.00	2.407 ±0.06	2.107 ±0.01	7.359 ±0.04	1.947 ±0.04	2.814 ±0.06

[wraithgar]

There is currently no error output (other than the registry bug) so my approach was to make it act as closely to how it works now without introducing new errors that could be considered breaking changes. We can certainly start exploding here, but as it stands now you can deprecate nonexistent versions with no warnings from npm.

[wraithgar]

npm has operated like this since at least v6 (I didn't check code before then)