Hi!
As some of you may know, nodejs package that is present in
EPEL is pretty outdated. The current v0.10 that we have will
go EOL in October and npm (package manager) is already not
maintained.
Currently, upstreams' plan is to have two versions of Long
Term Support (LTS) at once, one in active development and one
in maintenance mode.
Currently active is v4, which is switching to maintenance in
April and v6 which is switching to LTS in October.
This is also reason why we would like to skip v4, although
both will get security updates. Nodejs v6 also comes with
newer npm and v8 (which might best be bundled, as it is in
Fedora and Software Collections) (v8 might concern ruby and
database maintainers, but old v8 package still remains in
the repo).
There was also an idea to have both LTS versions in repo,
but we're not quite sure, how we'd do it and if it's even a
good idea.
Also, another thing is, if it is worth of updating every year
to new LTS or update only after the current one goes EOL.
According to guidelines, I'd say it's the latter, but it's
not exactly how node development works and some feedback from
users on this would be nice, because I have none.
tl;dr Need to update nodejs, but can't decide if v4 or v6,
v4: will update sooner, shorter support (2018-04-01)
v6: longer support (2019-04-01), *might* break more things,
won't be in stable sooner than mid-October if everything
goes well
Also need feedback from users.
I hope I didn't forget anything important.
Regards
Zuzka
Node.js SIG