Libraries fail to support LTS versions of Node.js

[gnidan]

• Version: Pretty much every version of these packages (for years now)
• Platform: Mac
• Subsystem: ipfs package

Severity:

High (The main functionality of the application does not work, API breakage, repo format breakage, etc.)

Description:

Right now, the ipfs package requires Node v15, even though Node v14 is LTS until April 2023. Pretty much every time I look at this, the situation is the same - Node v12 was dropped before LTS ended, etc. Again, for years now.

This is problematic because IPFS is an enormously consequential public good, and Node.js-based projects that wish to embed these packages cannot do so while offering a sensible support lifecycle to their users.

Please, this is not a "minor inconvenience", as has been stated in other issues. I'm coming to this from trufflesuite/truffle, where we got so fed up trying to offer our users access to IPFS and Filecoin that we had to remove it from our repo and package dependencies list entirely... and not for lack of trying.

Steps to reproduce the error:

Use LTS Node.js. Install ipfs. Observe error.

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[achingbrain]

The js-ipfs ecosystem projects support Node LTS Current and Node LTS Active. They do not support Node LTS Maintenance.

Long-term the idea is to not rely on features from node core as much as possible, writing only cross-platform js that runs anywhere (hello Deno, etc).

Unfortunately node is only just starting to embrace certain language features, so when we start to use them we become more compatible with non-node JS environments but unfortunately we also cut off older node versions.

We do wait for these versions to become part of Maintenance LTS, but there just aren't enough regular contributors to these projects to backport features to older versions of node or ensure compatibility outside of CI.

So as a downstream consumer of the project you have two choices:

1. Stick with the version that works with your supported platform
2. Upstream PRs that restore compatibility with your supported platform - I will gladly merge them

You appear to have made a third choice which is to opt-out of the ecosystem altogether, which is a great shame. I'm sorry you ran into problems - did you open issues for the problems you were seeing or PR any fixes?

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