Browser-compat-data: Breaking change with v1.0.13 release

[codexp]

The last release breaks Webpack builds on node.js 8.*

eslint Plugin, has a dependency on mdn-browser-compat-data
"eslint-plugin-compat": "^3.3.0",

It has been working fine until v1.0.13 release

yarn install

[2/4] Fetching packages...
error [email protected]: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=10.0.0". Got "8.17.0"
error Found incompatible module.

This is probably not compliant with semver?

Caused by: https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/pull/5806

[vinyldarkscratch]

Thanks for raising the issue! Upon initial thought, we figured that dropping support for a NodeJS release out of LTS wouldn't really be worth bumping the semver, and my initial research didn't lead to any definitive answers. However looking around, it seems that other packages bump the major version number when dropping support for a NodeJS version. So I guess, rather than 1.0.13, the release should have been 2.0.0. Pinging @Elchi3 on this one.

(P.S. you may want to consider updating your NodeJS version as Node v8 is out of LTS!)

[ddbeck]

it seems that other packages bump the major version number when dropping support for a NodeJS version

Can you link to some examples of this?

[vinyldarkscratch]

Sure thing! Some examples I found:

https://github.com/eslint/eslint/releases/tag/v7.0.0-alpha.0 (commit https://github.com/eslint/eslint/commit/2c28fbbb563a44282bef0c9fcc9be29d611cc83b)
https://github.com/chalk/chalk/releases/tag/v3.0.0 (commit https://github.com/chalk/chalk/commit/3ef170b457dd9a318f74080dbaeb935c86ed026b)
https://github.com/sindresorhus/ora/releases/tag/v4.0.0 (commit https://github.com/sindresorhus/ora/commit/64590906f7729f00fb1de6db4d846f53a3b66b80)
https://github.com/yargs/yargs/releases/tag/v15.0.0 (PR https://github.com/yargs/yargs/pull/1461)

[Elchi3]

Hmm, should we then wait to bump the nodejs version?

As I understand https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/pull/5806, we only did that in order to be a good citizen about our nodejs version... But if we're now actually breaking people's packages, we could probably back that out and release 1.0.14?

If we actually do release a 2.0.0 that would communicate a breaking change for sure, but do we really want to do that just to increase the (outdated) nodejs version?

[codexp]

In my case it breaks our builds and it may take a while until we will upgrade node.js.
There is probably no real reason to bump up node.js version, so older versions of node.js could still use this project without problems?

[ddbeck]

The next patch release of BCD will fix this problem (see #5863). I'd expect this by Thursday (unless @Elchi3 opts to do a release sooner). Sorry about the broken release, @codexp, and thanks for your patience while we correct it.

In the meantime, I added a note to 1.0.13 warning of the problem in Node <10.0.0.

For future reference, Florian and I decided to defer bumping the engine version until we actually want to use some feature from Node v10. In other words, we're not going to bump the engine version until we actually commit some code that doesn't work in v8.

[shinepd]

Our builds are also broken and we don't have the ability to lock this package down as one of our transitive dependencies references this project with an ^.

We'd greatly appreciate a patch as soon as possible :)

https://github.com/amilajack/eslint-plugin-compat/blob/master/package.json#L65

[Elchi3]

I've released 1.0.14! Let me know if this fixes the problems.

https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/releases/tag/v1.0.14
https://www.npmjs.com/package/mdn-browser-compat-data

Thanks for your patience everyone! I've learned a lesson here that a project about compatibility should probably be very compatible with old or legacy versions as much as possible :sweat_smile:

[Elchi3]

@codexp @shinepd are you good now?

[shinepd]

We're good to go. Thank you for the quick turnaround!

[codexp]

It works again, thank you very much!

[Elchi3]

@shinepd @codexp just curious as more and more packages require Node 10 (prettier 2 and chalk in our case). How are you dealing with the situation?

[Elchi3]

@shinepd @codexp see also https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/issues/5931
I would appreciate your thoughts.

[codexp]

We decided to drop eslint-plugin-compat for now, but would reintroduce it some time later.
But if that's the way it goes (your deps drop support for deprecated nodejs also), probably the rollback is only temporary solution.

The path described in https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/issues/5931 sounds nice.
That might keep this package functional for older nodejs, but only if you are able to freeze your deps before they require current nodejs version.

[vinyldarkscratch]

Considering that the packages follow semantic versioning rules (like we will remember to now), dependencies shouldn’t be too much of a problem for BCD v1.x, I’d say. We’ll only perform the package upgrades in v2.0. 😉

[shinepd]

@Elchi3 we're in the process of uplifting to Node 10 now so hopefully this won't be an issue for us for too long. We're definitely behind on getting to this update so I appreciate your willingness to work with us! I think the proposal in #5931 sounds great and agree with the semantic versioning proposal outlined by @vinyldarkscratch.

[Elchi3]

Thanks for your feedback! I think we can wait a little longer before proceeding with the plan in #5931 as nodejs 10 isn't a hard requirement for us (at least as of right now). It would be just to update our devDependencies. So, probably, I will give this another month at which point most folks might react to this more like "oh bcd requires node 10 now. Well, glad we did update to that already".