[ls-remote] only list active and/or maintained versions #3250
Description
What happened?
Currently nvm ls-remote --lts literally list all the LTS versions, including the ones are no longer in active and/or maintenance status.
What did you expect to happen?
The most common usage of nvm ls-remote is to check for new versions, which is only relevant for currently supported versions, namely the ones in active and/or maintenance phases.
Therefore it would make sense to allow one to only list the currently supported versions, or to exclude the no longer supported versions.
If the default behavior cannot be changed, it would make sense to introduce certain command line options, such as --supported or --no-supported.
And we can use awk to parse the nodejs release schedule json to find supported versions, with end date later than the current date, for example:
$ curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nodejs/Release/main/schedule.json |\
awk -vT=$(date +%F) '{if($1~/v[0-9]+/){v=$1;gsub(/[":]/,"",v);while($1!~/end/)getline;
e=$2;gsub(/[",]/,"",e);if(e>=T)print v,e}}'
v18 2025-04-30
v20 2026-04-30
v21 2024-06-01
v22 2027-04-30
v23 2025-06-01
v24 2028-04-30Metadata
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ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
No, because that's a function of time, and that's not something I want nvm's output to depend on.
ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Hmm, even if the content of https://nodejs.org/dist/index.tab is also somehow a function of time?
ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
It's not in the sense that nvm doesn't need to know the current date/time.
[-][ls-morete] possible to only list active and/or maintained versions?[/-][+][ls-remote] possible to only list active and/or maintained versions?[/+]ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
TBH I don't see why we cannot put it behind a flag such as
--supported, meanwhile maintain the existing behaviour as default?ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Of course we could. However, I don't think it would be a good idea to have anything depend on "the current date", and, if there were any way for a project's preferred node version to change based on the passage of time, then it would be possible for
nvm useinside a project to work one day, and stop working the next, which would be both unacceptable and violate semver.ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Hmm, here the request is only about
nvm ls-remote, with no involvement withnvm useat all.ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
That affects
nvm installas well, though.ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Maybe not if it's an option only for
nvm ls-remote?I guess this request would be more appealing back when
nvm_print_versionswas quite slow before it was reimplemented using awk.Nowadays it's pretty fast. But in the context of using
nvm ls-remoteto check for newer versions, the no longer supported versions are NOT going to get new versions at all, that's where this option can be useful, by making the output less cluttered.ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Is your motivation to hasten/shorten the response of
nvm ls-remote? That's very different from the OP :-)ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Well yes, that's it.
BTW, and which OP? I guess I'm a bit confused.
ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
I meant your original post.
ryenus commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Ahh, I was actually thinking the same, maybe my OP should have been more concise :-)
ljharb commentedon Dec 19, 2023
Would a
--min=18, for example, suffice here? basically it'd all work the same except it would omit displaying anything before v18 (and i'd optimize to skip contacting iojs.org entirely when the version was >= 4, etc)ryenus commentedon Dec 20, 2023
Yes, that also works! And it has the advantage of being more flexible.
Maybe we can even have it as the default? So that in the most common use case we save several keystrokes for all the users :-) Meanwhile those who want the old behavior can use
--min=0.ljharb commentedon Dec 20, 2023
I'm not quite comfortable with that level of a breaking change just yet; but perhaps I could also add an env var that sets that value, so it's easy to set your own default?
ryenus commentedon Dec 20, 2023
That would be really great! Much appreciated 👍
[-][ls-remote] possible to only list active and/or maintained versions?[/-][+][ls-remote] only list active and/or maintained versions[/+]