Node: Conflicting "Added in" versions

[oliversalzburg]

I was trying to find out when Buffer.from(array) was added and saw 5.10 mentioned in the documentation.

Someone later corrected me and said that it was available earlier and earlier documentation mentions 4.5.

So, something seems to be wrong here.

[addaleax]

4.5.0 was released on 2016-08-15, which was a couple of months after 5.10.0 (2016-03-31). Sometimes older API additions are backported to older major release streams. Maybe the image here helps clear things up a bit?

[returnString]

Could the documentation perhaps then be updated and reframed as "available from", as opposed to "added in"? Would make more sense with backports :)

[oliversalzburg]

That is very interesting. Thanks for explaining :)

My main problem was with my understanding of the branches and the documentation. As the second link I posted isn't actually "earlier documentation". It is the documentation for the 4.x LTS branch, not the versions that happened before another version.

[MylesBorins]

available in might be an interesting alternative, but will require quite a bit more diligence, and commits against multiple release lines.

/cc @nodejs/lts @nodejs/documentation

[sam-github]

Not sure why this is labelled "question", its a bug in the documentation. When the feature was backported, the Added in needed to get back-dated, too, didn't it?

Though its not clear to me what added in means... if something gets backported to 4.x, that doesn't mean it necessarily shows up in any 5.x releases, for example, whereas if it was implemented originally in a 4.x, it would be present in every 5.x. Our Added in annotations might need to become richer.

[borisovg]

I agree that the current situation is not good. I came across the same problem just now with regards to docs for Buffer. In our environment there are multiple versions of Node floating around and I need to know which is the minimum version required to run my app (they are linked to appliance software versions so will not go away until those are upgraded).

[sam-github]

Not you don't have a "minimum", you'll have multiple mimimums, ^4.5.0 >=5.10.0 would be your engine spec, I think.

[borisovg]

@sam-github you're right - thanks for catching this for me! :)

[addaleax]

I’m closing this issue since the original question here has been answered, if there is more to be discussed about the added: tags that would probably be better kept for a different issue specific to that discussion.