Node 20 internal use feature flagging

[nyarly]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

When trying to update our self-hosted runners, we ran into the problem that the current version of our base OS (NixOS 26.05) doesn't ship with Node 20, and their default build of Runner doesn't include Node 20 in externals. "Great!" we thought, Node 20 is EOL and insecure, so that seems like the right decision. We went over all our workflows and updated our action uses to versions that depend on Node 24, only to discover that hashFiles for actions/cache requires Node 20. We got it squared away, doing our own builds of 20 and getting them configured, but it was a hassle, and I'm not looking forward to that build process going forward.

Looking at the Runner code, though, I see that it relies on Node 20, but that it also has feature flagging to advance the internal usage to Node 24 (by default, or by requirement), but the svc.sh doesn't seem to enable those.

My question then is: why not? Github Actions has been pretty clear on the need to migrate action code to Node 24. Node 20 is EOL as of March 24. It seems like the internal use is for a handful of small JavaScript functions that are easily tested on 24.

Given that we're shipping our own SystemD unit file (based on what svc.sh creates), is there a reason not to set the "require24" feature flag, apart from limiting what actions we can use?

[github-actions[bot]]

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