Scripts: Enhance check-engines to consider "latest" versions

[aduth]

Previously: #12721
Related: #14192 (comment)

Currently, wp-scripts check-engines is hard-coded to default to Node >=10.0.0 and npm >=6.0.0:

gutenberg/packages/scripts/scripts/check-engines.js

Lines 23 to 24 in 62f81e1

	'--node', '>=10.0.0',
	'--npm', '>=6.0.0',

This doesn't faithfully represent the versions Gutenberg expects, which are respectively "latest Node LTS" and "latest npm version"

You should be running a Node version matching the current active LTS release or newer for this plugin to work correctly.

You also should have the latest release of npm installed.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#getting-started

If the check-engines script is intended to adhere to this recommendation, it should ideally do so in a way which doesn't require manual updates.

It does not appear that the underlying check-node-version project supports this, but perhaps part of the script can be to retrieve the latest versions information.

• For npm, the data[ 'dist-tags' ].latest result from https://registry.npmjs.org/npm JSON blob
• For Node, the result of data, first version of sorted by date, filtered by lts value equal to the current LTS codename (currently "Dubnium", may need to be manually updated) from https://nodejs.org/dist/index.json

cc @gziolo @ntwb @adamsilverstein

[ntwb]

I wonder if this could be added as an enhancement to the existing valid-values-engines rule of npm-package-json-lint?

https://github.com/tclindner/npm-package-json-lint/wiki/valid-values-engines

[gziolo]

I like this proposal. It would be very helpful. The very naive implementation we have at the moment was very easy to implement. It runs as predev and prebuild scripts. My only concern would be how it is handled when someone is offline. At the moment it's a non-issue as those numbers are hardcoded. We would need to ensure it has some cached value as a fallback to be used in a scenario like that.

[aduth]

My only concern would be how it is handled when someone is offline. At the moment it's a non-issue as those numbers are hardcoded. We would need to ensure it has some cached value as a fallback to be used in a scenario like that.

That's true. Another thought which had occurred to me is that we set something up which acts similar to Greenkeeper in automating pull requests to bump the version once a new one becomes available. It just seemed a bit cumbersome / more involved to implement this way.

I wonder if this could be added as an enhancement to the existing valid-values-engines rule of npm-package-json-lint?

How then would it be captured? Is the idea that check-engines script would be updated to compare against the engines entry? Seems to me like it should be doing that anyways.

• For Node, the result of data, first version of sorted by date, filtered by lts value equal to the current LTS codename (currently "Dubnium", may need to be manually updated) from https://nodejs.org/dist/index.json

Update to my own comment: If we wanted this fully automated, the Node Release WG does publish a JSON file with the current LTS codenames:

https://github.com/nodejs/Release/blob/eb91c94/schedule.json#L46-L52

[gziolo]

As of #28143, check-engines uses the engines config from @wordpress/scripts by default.

It still would be great to implement the solution that would allow to pass a flag like --latest that is able to detect proper versions.