Update google-gax to 4.0.0?

[SimonSchick]

Wondering when you plan to update, we are trying to slim down dependencies and google-gax 3.6 ships a bunch of bloat, see https://github.com/googleapis/gax-nodejs/releases/tag/v4.0.0

[SchroederSteffen]

+1

Looking forward to this dependency upgrade as well.

1. Cleaned up dependencies
2. (False positive?) Vulnerability reported in word-wrap via protobufjs-cli: 🔒 fix: CVE-2023-26115 jonschlinkert/word-wrap#33

[feywind]

Unfortunately, we can't for now:

drop Node 12 & decouple development dependencies (https://github.com/googleapis/gax-nodejs/issues/1439)

The wheels are in motion for dropping Node 12 here too, so once the next major happens, this upgrade will probably follow shortly.

[SimonSchick]

Given that nodejs v16 is EOL in october I find it surprising that v12 is still officially supported by you given it was EOL'd in 2019, unsure why you won't just release just a new major version?

[feywind]

If it were up to me, I'd happily jump straight to 16 minimum and 20 standard, but there are a bunch of deprecation and support policies we have to work with. I'm kind of frustrated about it, too -- the Node community at large has moved on already, which makes maintenance a pain.

We are in the process of dropping 12 now in our main branch, which will pull in gax 4 (which is still baking a little in spite of the @next version). But I don't want to cross too many wires until that's done. I'm going to see about 3.6.1 in Pub/Sub at least.

[SimonSchick]

I don't understand how releasing a new major version, which generally doesn't violate support policies, is an issue, but I'm not going to pretend to know your support contracts either :)

Thank you for the explanation and for communicating this so clearly, I don't get to see this a whole lot recently!

[feywind]

We like to keep it real in developer relations 😁 Disclaimer though, anything I'm writing here shouldn't be taken as official policy or something, always check cloud.google.com for the official word.

I was thinking I might make a Medium post about this topic of Node versioning, actually. I'll post the link here if that ends up happening.

[feywind]

Here is that Medium post, if anyone is curious: https://feywind.medium.com/major-versions-in-the-node-cloud-sdks-d5267180f429

[feywind]

This is done with the new major, yay :)

[The-Don-Himself]

Thanks @feywind 👍 , I was actually blocked by this. I know its a separate repo, but fingers crossed this follows suit soon
googleapis/nodejs-firestore#1867