Dropping 0.12 Support

[stephenplusplus]

request is a very core module to our project and they dropped 0.12 support about a month ago. It would be unfortunate to lock down to a single release, because they commonly receive security updates, and they are at the wheel of every [non-gRPC] API request that we send.

The most recent version of request that is compatible with Node v0.12 is 2.76.0. Our dependency, google-auto-auth, is depending on 2.79.0. By default, npm will still install it after printing a warning:

$ npm install google-cloud
npm WARN engine request@2.79.0: wanted: {"node":">= 4"} (current: {"node":"0.12.17","npm":"2.15.1"})

... but it doesn't mean it will work at runtime.

Additionally, there are about 3 other dependencies we use which are no longer supporting Node versions < 4. Is it time we join the others and support Node runtimes >= 4?

// @omaray @jgeewax @jmdobry @JustinBeckwith
// (please CC others who might be interested)

[callmehiphop]

Maintenance for 0.12 officially ends at the end of this year per the LTS schedule.

[jmuk]

cc: @ofrobots too
Big 👍 for this, but to be clear, we can't drop the 0.12 support until LTS ends -- and I believe we want to wait a bit to make sure that the usage decreases on our platform. I hear that some AppEngine Flex users still use 0.12.

[ofrobots]

I can't wait until 0.12 goes EOL as well. I do suspect that many people will continue using 0.12 for a little bit after it goes out of support. Looking at the metrics from npm, 0.10 still has some usage even though there is no official support for it by Node.js core:

Node 6.x is now the most popular version of node. Node 0.10 and 0.12 together have 15% share. pic.twitter.com/e4Dx2Omvwn

— Laurie Voss (@ seldo) December 1, 2016

It would have been nice if we could get download stats from npm which correlate the downloads of google-cloud with each version of node used to download with. That would provide us stronger confidence about what our users are using.

When it comes to dropping support for 0.12 is concerned, there are a few types of actions we could take:

1. Adjust the engines field in the package.json to indicate that we require >= 4.x.
2. Stop testing against 0.12 in our CI.
3. Actively start using 4.x+ features, e.g. arrow functions.

Continuing to state that we support 0.12 after Node.js core (and OpenSSL) drops support for it would be irresponsible, so we should 'drop support'. However, we do know that some folks will continue using the client libraries with 0.12 for a little while longer (at their own risk). Forcibly breaking these users by eagerly jumping on new language features would be unfortunate. We should give users some time to migrate.

I think we should balance the trade-off here. IMHO, we should modify the engines field between now and the end of this month (when core drops support for 0.12). After a small N months (say 2?) we should stop testing on CI and feel free to start using newer languages features.

This would be a lot easier to decide if we has detailed npm download stats.

Thoughts?
/cc @GoogleCloudPlatform/node-team

[seldo]

npm would be happy to provide Google Cloud with stats on which versions of node we see making requests to the registry. We'd need the list of IPs (or IP ranges) google cloud machines are using.

[ofrobots]

@seldo it is possible to to know the node version distribution for a given package regardless of the ip address?

[seldo]

Absolutely.

[ofrobots]

@seldo Great! in that case the stats on the module google-auth-library would probably give us the data we need.

[seldo]

Here's the data since the 1st of January, since that happened to be easy to run:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VxzjALwzO_McvTyzEN-PCR_tDx9Y-vRKLn8Qi358yzM/edit?usp=sharing

TLDR:
Node 6.x: 57%
Node 4.x: 27%
Node 7.x: 6%
Node 5.x: 6%
Node 0.10: 3.4%
Node 0.12: 1.2%

I personally do not think that it's a good idea to abandon support for 4.6% of your userbase, but then that's a problem I have with Node as well :-)

[ofrobots]

@seldo many thanks!

[jcking]

Quick update. According to #1994 (comment) gRPC has dropped 0.12 support. grpc/grpc#8895 confirmed that. I created grpc/grpc#9707 to cleanup the remaining references to Node.js 0.12 in gRPC.

[stephenplusplus]

We've changed our minimum supported version in the google-cloud package.json to >= 4. However, all of the submodules except for @google-cloud/spanner work with >= 0.12. We're going to continue to support 0.12 wherever possible until it impedes the module. New APIs will use >= 4.0.

[lukesneeringer]

Opening this back up.

• We are about to declare three libraries GA, and even just bumping engines implies a semver bump.
• Node 0.12 has now been officially EOLd for three months.

If we want to be able to do this anytime soon on these libraries, we really need to do it now. I assert that we should. We have already ceased testing on Node 0.12.

[lukesneeringer]

@seldo Would it be possible to get updated numbers?

[lukesneeringer]

Note: I am about to send a PR that does this (along with the beta/GA stuff), but I still consider this to be an open discussion. That said, we will almost certainly do it if nobody dissents, and right now the general consensus seems to be to do it.

[seldo]

I have updated the spreadsheet. TLDR:

7 15%
6 63%
5 5%
4 13%
0.12 1.2%
0.10 2.9%

So 0.x people are still 4.1%.

Source is 86k requests over the last 7 days.

[lukesneeringer]

Thank you so much @seldo.

We did decide to bump engines.node to >= 4.0.0, since we are GA'ing a library and otherwise we might be stuck with official 0.12 support for another year.

I assume based on the Node 0.10 traffic that it will still install on Node 0.12 (presumably with some kind of warning), but officially we are moving to 4.0.0+.

Thank you so much!

[Splaktar]

Good choice! I don't think that there is any good reason to support v0.1x. Glad to see the move to 4.x+!