Should Express 5.0 require a minimum of Node.js 4?

[dougwilson]

This is a discussion regarding having Express 5.0 drop support for Node.js 0.10. One of the reasons for the delay in Express 5.0 was the announcement of the official merging of Node.js and io.js, and we were looking forward to it's outcome to determine what we should do with Express 5.0.

Here at Express, we value very long-lived major versions, allowing users to confidentially build their new server on Express and not have to worry about needing to upgrade across a major, breaking change for years. Express 4.0 has been out for over a year now and Express 3.0 was supported for over 3 years !!

When Express 5.0 comes out, Express 4.x line will continue to be fully supported, delivering our users bug fixes, new features, and more!

To this end, we have been carefully watching io.js/Node.js in relation to Express 5.0 such that we can continue this great support history without accidentally locking us into the past for a long time.

Please share your thoughts here.

[Fishrock123]

Fwiw 0.10 will be EOL'd October 2016, and 0.12 at the end of year, 2016.

The former is already in maintenance mode, and 0.12 will go into maintenance-only next April. 0.12's EOL was cut short due to OpenSSL ending support for 1.0.1 at end-of-year 2016.

More info: https://github.com/nodejs/LTS (Slightly outdated)

I'd personally vote for yes (biased I suppose), and try to encourage a larger move to 4.0.0 sooner than later for users.

[Twipped]

Dropping 0.10 for 5.0 sounds good to me. Express 4 isn't that different, right?

[alanpurple]

+1
drop support for 0.10

[hacksparrow]

Highly in favor of dropping support for 0.10.

[talon]

Open source should move as fast as possible w/ option for sponsored LTS. Drop it.

[aredridel]

What's the cost of not dropping 0.10?

[andineck]

Moving forward to node 4.0 seems more important than supporting 0.10

[dougwilson]

So, just to be clear: Express 5.x dropping support for Node.js 0.10 does not mean Express will drop support for Node.js 0.10. Just like Express 3.x has lived in parallel with Express 4.x for almost 2 years now, Express 4.x will continue to live alongside Express 5.x.

To answer @aredridel , not dropping 0.10 from Express 5.x means that 5.x would be hard-pressed to consume and support various features in the newer V8 and Node.js platform (things like Intl, generators, promises, and more). Because we want to make longtivity promises, this means that once Express 5.0 comes out, an Express 6.0 is unlikely to appear until 1 year or more later, putting it further behind the curve.

Here is a little mock-up support example:

Year             0      1      2      3      4      5      6

Express 3 (0.8 ) +--------------------+
Express 4 (0.10)               +--------------------+
Express 5 (4?  )                      +--------------------+

Typically we'll have 2 active Express majors at a time (more than that gets harder, and the benefit decreases). The idea is that we can then perhaps up the minimum Node.js version with a major, since the previous major will still be around for a long time to come after the release. If you look back at the history of the 3.x line while 4.x has existed, we continued to backport every single new feature from Express 4.x into 3.x that was possible with 3.x's design. We intend to do the same with 4.x/5.x, which means 4.x will keep up; the release of 5.x does not move 4.x into "maintenance mode", either.

[Twipped]

Perhaps a better question to ask is, what does Express gain by dropping 0.10 but not 0.12? Most of the improvements you mention cant adopted until 0.12 is abandoned.

[Fishrock123]

Perhaps a better question to ask is, what does Express gain by dropping 0.10 but not 0.12? Most of the improvements you mention cant adopted until 0.12 is abandoned.

Good point.

If we drop 0.10 we should probably also just drop 0.12.

Stats are that 0.12 doesn't have nearly the usage of 0.10, and is, quite frankly, rather buggy.

[dougwilson]

@ChiperSoft @Fishrock123 , oh, my bad. I do not like to think of 0.12 as even exiting, as there are so many issues with the V8 in that version, it's laughable that people can even use that version of Node.js without getting various illegal instruction errors from corrupted machine code generation.

Yes, this topic assumes that the minimum for Express 5 would be Node.js 4. I have updated the title to correspond :)