@aminya : What do you think about it? The current released beta really has issues/problems with installing. So I would prefer having a new beta release with tweetnacl. So we can fix this decently but at ease...

I do agree that it's not ideal to remove it. But how were the beta-6 and earlier shipped? Without libsodium I guess?

Also, dynamic linking in combination with .node files will be cumbersome for the many platforms I think: nodejs/node-gyp#89 (I am an electron user, so I have a big focus on that)

So a static build of libsodium will be the most easy/stable/versatile I guess...

But this PR was to quickly address the failing install of the current released beta. And even the case I had on macOS, where the shipped .node in my electron build has a hard dependency on libsodium installed on the client. Without being bundled currently...

So I had runtime crashes at clients, without noticing at first, as my own environment is the build environment l, which had libsodium installed...

Btw, currently, the windows build is built without libsodium, as it is not installed on the CI. So it's not uniform anyway now. That is why I thought this PR is a good first step.

Another "problem" I see is that the whole build system should have a working fallback if libsodium wasn't installed on the build system: e.g. for rebuilds on installs where the prebuilts are incompatible. That is why I think the libsodium-cmake is a good idea, so it's always available correctly. E.g. for windows, installation of libsodium is not trivial, as you should know in advance which libsodium variant to link with (msvc/mingw).

I do completely agree, that for the official 6.0 release, this should be resolved. But like said, the current beta release is not really usable currently, both for macOS as for Linux... So the full correct/reproducible solution will take quite some effort imo.

@aminya : As the upstream issue in libzmq was not accepted (initially hopefully) this will take time. And so the latest published build is not usable for all OSses. So I am in favour of merging this PR for a temporary working solution at least...

Do we have a timescale for this?

I'm having different issues on Node 20 with zeromq 6.0.0-beta.17 on the CI and in the Docker images:

 /opt/actions-runner/_work/_tool/node/20.9.0/arm64/bin/node: symbol lookup error: /opt/actions-runner/_work/platform/platform/.yarn/unplugged/zeromq-npm-6.0.0-beta.17-8f82236e6c/node_modules/zeromq/build/Release/zeromq.node: undefined symbol: sodium_init

Error: Error relocating /platform/.yarn/unplugged/zeromq-npm-6.0.0-beta.17-8f82236e6c/node_modules/zeromq/build/Release/zeromq.node: crypto_box_easy_afternm: symbol not found

We really need get this PR in

Thanks @aminya , in name of the zmq.js community ;-).

Should we mention that CURVE is disabled then in the README?
A new release would befit many then from now on! 🙏