LTS release dist directory

[yosuke-furukawa]

I don't understand where is the better discussion place. But I would like to raise a problem for LTS release directory.

I am a maintainer of nodebrew, nodebrew is a version manager for Node.js.
I have a problem to implement an option to get latest LTS release.

problem

currently nodejs.org/dist and nodejs.org/download does not have lts directory. so nodebrew command does not recognize which version is latest LTS version. As this blog, LTS version will be even number and Stable version will be odd.

I can recognize LTS version to parse the version number but I don't want to parse the number to implement easily and some even version may not be LTS version in the future.

hokaccha/nodebrew#47

solution

We need lts directory like nodejs.org/dist/lts or nodejs.org/download/lts.
For example:

dist/
  |- lts/
       |- latest
       |- v0.10.xx
       |- v0.12.xx
       |- v4.x.x

or

dist/
  |- lts/
       |- latest
       |- argon
       |- boron
       |- ....

[rvagg]

we have latest-argon there now, does that help?

[yosuke-furukawa]

I would like to get latest LTS version from the dist or downloads folder easily.
if latest-lts is in dist, nodebrew can get latest LTS version node easily.

[rvagg]

So far we've avoided having any generic "lts" or "latest lts" signifier, we're going to have up to 3 parallel lts lines as time goes on and automatically switching users from one lts to another just because one appears is not a great idea. We've decided with the linux distributions to not enable any kind of automatic semver-major upgrading, you have to opt in. Imagine doing an upgrade one day and going straight from v4 to v6, is that what a user would expect?

So instead, perhaps you should grab https://nodejs.org/download/release/index.json and parse it to understand what the current status is and make decisions based on that. You shouldn't have to use the latest-* directories at all since you have all this information.

Does that make sense for your use-case?

[shigeki]

Using index.json is a good idea but all of v0.12/v0.10 are lts: false now. They do not have a code name and process.release.lts. So do we take them as out of LTS distributions or mark lts: ??? only for their latest version?

[rvagg]

open to suggestions, perhaps we should force lts:true for 0.10 and 0.12 just to be consistent, I've been willing to let it slip because v4 represents the start of our new process but we have explicitly included them as lts

[shigeki]

lts:true would cause an issue if a parser has not a type when a code name starts from the letter of t.

@yosuke-furukawa @hokaccha Is it good to put v0.12/v0.10 out of lts flag and manage them separated from lts?

[yosuke-furukawa]

Sounds fine! we will parse the index.json. Thank you @rvagg @shigeki