Drop Node.js 14 and 16

[harryzcy]

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Description

Fixes #3746

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[harryzcy]

Is there anything blocking on this?

[chakflying]

Even though they are officially out of support, there are still many devices out there using old versions. I think I don't see the need to drop testing for them unless there is a feature that we really need only in newer versions.

[CommanderStorm]

@harryzcy
Thank you for this contribution.
Currently, I don't really see a reason to force our users to upgrade.
If there are (security/other) reasons which we are missing, we would love to hear them either in this issue (if not security related) or as a security advisory if it is.

Note that we will likely update to node >=16 as part of the gamedig-5 update as mentioned in #4414

Personal note:
We might have to change this to only support the versions of node in security support, depending what comes out of (^= we will see in a few years) the EU Product Liability Directive¹ and depending on what "commercial" really means.

Footnotes

1. See
   https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3683-the-regulators-are-coming-one-year-on/ for a good introduction to this topic ↩

[CommanderStorm]

I think we have discussed that we need to drop node 14+16 for v2 in #4557

@chakflying @louislam any concearns about merging this PR?

[louislam]

npm@9 should be not necessary anymore.

[chakflying]

To summarize, moving to

≥ v16 gives us:

• built-in parsing of certificates (Feat: Add warning for cert. hostname mismatch #3942)
• gamedig 5.0

≥ v18 gives us:

• croner 8.0
• Simplifying of the testing code

[Zaid-maker]

Louis is right npm@9 not necessary

[CommanderStorm]

I removed npm@9

just to recap: npm@9 was added because of the lockfile version of v3, right?

[Zaid-maker]

I removed npm@9

just to recap: npm@9 was added because of the lockfile version of v3, right?

no i don't think so it was added to cap the installation of npm to 9 because of npm version 10 has breaking change and comes with node.js 20 that's why #3670

[CommanderStorm]

What breaking changes? ci-name¹ is not used and the other changes are not really relevant to us (except if we install npm@latest as before ^^)

Footnotes

1. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v10/using-npm/changelog#1000-2023-08-31 ↩

[louislam]

As I remembered, Node.js 14 or 16 on GitHub Actions came with npm 6 or 7 before which was too old. So I added the @latest tag in order to update the npm to the latest version (v9 at that moment).

But later, the @latest became v10 which is not compatible with Node.js 14/16, so I locked it to @9.