Node.js Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Meeting 2023-09-27

[mhdawson]

Time

UTC Wed 27-Sep-2023 13:00 (01:00 PM):

Timezone	Date/Time
US / Pacific	Wed 27-Sep-2023 06:00 (06:00 AM)
US / Mountain	Wed 27-Sep-2023 07:00 (07:00 AM)
US / Central	Wed 27-Sep-2023 08:00 (08:00 AM)
US / Eastern	Wed 27-Sep-2023 09:00 (09:00 AM)
EU / Western	Wed 27-Sep-2023 14:00 (02:00 PM)
EU / Central	Wed 27-Sep-2023 15:00 (03:00 PM)
EU / Eastern	Wed 27-Sep-2023 16:00 (04:00 PM)
Moscow	Wed 27-Sep-2023 16:00 (04:00 PM)
Chennai	Wed 27-Sep-2023 18:30 (06:30 PM)
Hangzhou	Wed 27-Sep-2023 21:00 (09:00 PM)
Tokyo	Wed 27-Sep-2023 22:00 (10:00 PM)
Sydney	Wed 27-Sep-2023 23:00 (11:00 PM)

Or in your local time:

• https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Node.js+Foundation+Technical%20Steering%20Committee%20(TSC)+Meeting+2023-09-27&iso=20230927T1300
• or https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=01PM+UTC%2C+Sep+27%2C+2023+in+local+time

Links

• Minutes Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bxV-dub8Sg5Z2UbZhcdTuOxeXXmqGDjyjmBfmWb1Ds/edit

Agenda

Extracted from tsc-agenda labelled issues and pull requests from the nodejs org prior to the meeting.

nodejs/admin

• Collaborator Changes - More Privacy #834
• Have a mascot #828
• Create nodejs/socket repository for Node.js implementation of Cloudflare's Socket API #826

Invited

• Antoine du Hamel @aduh95 (voting member)
• Yagiz Nizipli @anonrig (voting member)
• Anatoli Papirovski @apapirovski (voting member)
• Benjamin Gruenbaum @benjamingr (voting member)
• Ruben Bridgewater @BridgeAR (voting member)
• Colin Ihrig @cjihrig (voting member)
• Danielle Adams @danielleadams (voting member)
• Geoffrey Booth @GeoffreyBooth (voting member)
• Gireesh Punathil @gireeshpunathil (voting member)
• James Snell @jasnell (voting member)
• Joyee Cheung @joyeecheung (voting member)
• Chengzhong Wu @legendecas (voting member)
• Matteo Collina @mcollina (voting member)
• Michael Dawson @mhdawson (voting member)
• Moshe Atlow @MoLow (voting member)
• Rafael Gonzaga @RafaelGSS (voting member)
• Darshan Sen @RaisinTen (voting member)
• Richard Lau @richardlau (voting member)
• Robert Nagy @ronag (voting member)
• Ruy Adorno @ruyadorno (voting member)
• Michaël Zasso @targos (voting member)
• Tobias Nießen @tniessen (voting member)
• Rich Trott @Trott (voting member)
• Beth Griggs @BethGriggs (regular member)
• Ben Noordhuis @bnoordhuis (regular member)
• Сковорода Никита Андреевич @ChALkeR (regular member)
• Shelley Vohr @codebytere (regular member)
• Daniel Bevenius @danbev (regular member)
• Franziska Hinkelmann @fhinkel (regular member)
• Gabriel Schulhof @gabrielschulhof (regular member)
• Brian White @mscdex (regular member)
• Myles Borins @MylesBorins (regular member)
• Rod Vagg @rvagg (regular member)
• Tiancheng Timothy Gu @TimothyGu (regular member)

Observers/Guests

Notes

The agenda comes from issues labelled with tsc-agenda across all of the repositories in the nodejs org. Please label any additional issues that should be on the agenda before the meeting starts.

Joining the meeting

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/611357642
Regular password

Public participation

We stream our conference call straight to YouTube so anyone can listen to it live, it should start playing at https://www.youtube.com/c/nodejs+foundation/live when we turn it on. There's usually a short cat-herding time at the start of the meeting and then occasionally we have some quick private business to attend to before we can start recording & streaming. So be patient and it should show up.

---

Invitees

Please use the following emoji reactions in this post to indicate your
availability.

• 👍 - Attending
• 👎 - Not attending
• 😕 - Not sure yet

[LiviaMedeiros]

IIRC nodejs/node#49531/#49629 should be on the agenda.

[GeoffreyBooth]

IIRC nodejs/node#49531/#49629 should be on the agenda.

What is the question or issue that you would like the TSC to resolve?

We discussed those PRs last week and I described my suggested rollout from nodejs/node#49531 (comment) and no one objected. I opened nodejs/node#49869 as the first step of that plan.

[LiviaMedeiros]

What is the question or issue that you would like the TSC to resolve?

1. Semverity - there were mixed opinions but not much arguments towards any. I'd prefer this to be resolved by TSC to avoid unnecessary overcaution nor overlooking valid reason to be conservative.

2. Lifting the current objection. Most of reasons to do so covered in the discussion, but tl;dr landing it as part of esm: --experimental-default-type flag to flip module defaults node#49869 would give a few critical issues:

• It won't work properly in module scope by default; e.g. own "./bin/" files in packages that are not ready to flip mode, or any scripts that use minimalistic pjson while not being a part of package.
• It will be unusable in any published projects, because flag stops working under /node_modules/ directory.
• It will gatekeep support for any non-ESM extensionless files (only wasm atm) under ESM flag.
• After being extracted or after the actual default flip, it will introduce unnecessary breaking change to scripts that can work only in this mode.
• It will indirectly block any further additions to --type flag for the same reason why we can't overload --input-type: users who just need extensionless scripts will get a bunch of unwanted side effects.

Benefits of landing it as part of flag:

• none, assuming that module: support Wasm without file extension within module scope node#49540 and the actual "default flip flag" from esm: --experimental-default-type flag to flip module defaults node#49869 can also land.

There was the blocking concern of "users will get frustrated if we have extless ESM in scope but not outside of scope" but now that nodejs/node#49869 exists it's not a problem: extless support from nodejs/node#49629 will perfectly work with --type flag, just like if stray files were inside of module scope.
Having extless loose ESM without any flag at all right now is not possible, because extless loose files are interpreted as CJS. On a longer distance, if plan from nodejs/node#49432 about flipping the unflagged default succeeds, it will work out of the box as well, just like if there was a global module scope.

I hope I made it clear.

[benjamingr]

@LiviaMedeiros any chance you can attend the TSC meeting if we discuss this so we have more context and can ask questions?

[LiviaMedeiros]

Sure. What's needed from my side to attend?

[GeoffreyBooth]

For reference, here’s the objection: nodejs/node#49531 (review).

My PR nodejs/node#49869 satisfies all the requests in the objection, and includes the support for extensionless ESM and Wasm files in module scopes from the blocked PRs, albeit behind an experimental flag. So I think what’s really being asked of the TSC here is that that behavior in the blocked PRs can be released unflagged, even before nodejs/node#49531 lands, is that correct?

I don’t think that shipping support for extensionless ESM and Wasm files in module scopes needs to be semver-major. I had commented on that thread how someone might argue that it’s semver-major, but not that I held that view. If others want to take a look, that would be good to get consensus on. But I’m not blocking on that point.

And since nodejs/node#49869 exists now, I’ll lift my block as soon as that lands and has been in the wild for a bit without issue. I mentioned as much in the PR description for nodejs/node#49869. I don’t think we need to wait for the entire 21 release lifetime; it’s not a semver-major change, so a few minor releases (so a month or two) should probably be sufficient, assuming we don’t get a ton of bug reports.

[GeoffreyBooth]

Sure. What’s needed from my side to attend?

@LiviaMedeiros Please either send an email to tsc@nodejs.org or contact individual TSC members on the OpenJS Slack: https://openjs-foundation.slack.com and someone can share instructions on how to join the meeting.