Add support for node 24

[Laurin-W]

Title is self-explanatory.

Currently supported versions: node 20, node 22

[NSeydoux]

Hi @Laurin-W , thanks for opening this. There are no major changes introduced in Node 24, the upgrade should be smooth. I'll do the upgrade soon, I just want to take some time to make the change at once across all of our libraries for consistency.

[srosset81]

@NSeydoux Any news on this ?
I don't think forcing a lower version of NodeJS is a good practice in general.
If all NPM packages did this, it would be impossible to run anything as soon as a new version of Node is available ! ;-)
I would recommend to use "node": ">=20" instead.

[NSeydoux]

Sorry for the delay, I'm addressing this now with #4141.

And @srosset81 I don't really agree: the supported engines field is indicative, it doesn't prevent downstream consumers from running in an environment that isn't explicitly supported. I prefer to keep the "supported versions" field aligned with what we test: if we don't have tests covering Node 24, then a developer building using our library may get unexpected errors without a dedicated warning, making them harder to investigate. If you get a warning upon install that such and such libraries are not tested for your current version of Node, at least you know things can happen. In most cases, things will go smoothly, and all you get is a warning, but if we were relying on a deprecated feature that gets removed, then the issue is easier to investigate.

However, ideally, I totally agree that we would be moving libraries forward sooner in the Node version lifecycle (currently, we target the active state, rather than current).

[rubensworks]

And @srosset81 I don't really agree: the supported engines field is indicative, it doesn't prevent downstream consumers from running in an environment that isn't explicitly supported.

@NSeydoux Unfortunately, some package managers (such as yarn classic, which is still quite popular, we also use it for Comunica) error on unsupported engine versions by default, and only warn when using the --ignore-engines flag.
Our Comunica Link Traversal users run into this problem all the time (as we depend on solid-client-authn-js), so not having the engines field would make our lives a lot easier.

[NSeydoux]

Thanks for flagging this @rubensworks , I wasn't aware. That's a shame, it's convenient to have a flag indicating the expected runtime to let people know whether they are on a supported version or not. I'll look around to see if I find alternative approaches.

[rubensworks]

I'll look around to see if I find alternative approaches.

Perhaps a postinstall script that prints a warning to the console when called for specific Node versions could work?

[jeswr]

Hi @NSeydoux 👋

Could you cut a release with the changes in #4141 - thankyou!