Coordination on npm releases

[mcollina]

As nodejs/node#20190 comes in I was totally surprised that we did not discuss at all which version of npm we were going to ship in Node 10. We can do better.

I think we should do either a quarterly update, or just a sync 2-3 months before any major release.
I'm happy to take this responsibility if there are no other volunteers in the @nodejs/tsc or @nodejs/release. (I have never updated npm on node, so there are plently of people way more qualified than me on the coding side, and if you want to take this, please do).

I'm tagging this tsc-agenda, but I'll skip next meeting (I'm on vacation).

cc @iarna @zkat

[jasnell]

As with everything, it requires an owner. We only have so much visibility and coordnation into what v8 release we're going to ship because of the diligent work by @targos, @fhinkel and the whole @nodejs/v8 team to actively integrate, test, and discuss on an ongoing basis. I the prep for 10.0.0 I never needed to coordinate what v8 was going to land because of the diligence of that team in keeping things updated and communicated.

The same kind of ongoing effort can be applied here. Dropping a major pre-stable update PR late in the day on a Friday with only one full business day before the actual release makes things extremely difficult. I know there was some confusion on the npm side about the release date, but even if we were releasing on the 30th like they originally thought, this pr is coming very late in the process. What would be far more helpful is earlier proactive communication in both directions and a more incremental process. If nothing else, it would have been helpful if an npm6 tracking issue had been opened a month or two ago and attached to the 10.0.0 milestone.

My apologies if I'm coming off a bit grumpy but I just spent a week testing 10.0.0 test builds and was looking forward to some downtime over the weekend and now with this pr I find myself having to give up weekend family time to do more testing in order to get this update landed in time.

[mhdawson]

I agree being more proactive as @mcollina suggests. Sounds like @mcollina if volunteering to the "champion" and we could add npm to the list of strategic initiatives as we did for v8 as a regular reminder for updates/making sure we are on track.

[fhinkel]

@mcollina does this need to be tagged with tsc-agenda? Seems to me like there's consensus within @nodejs/release.

[mcollina]

tsc-agenda can be removed.

[MylesBorins]

I'm willing to help work on this.

…

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 2:52 AM Matteo Collina ***@***.***> wrote: tsc-agenda can be removed. — You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#528 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAecV7Z4qxl_dHU8YTpy2prmkSGFuuD_ks5trsuVgaJpZM4TeWhR> .

[mhdawson]

@mcollina ssuming @MylesBorins PR to add himself as the champion for this can the issue be closed?

[mcollina]

Yes.