Dropping support for Ubuntu/Bionic by upgrading to nodejs v18

[Sam Clegg]

Hi all,

In emsdk we currently support running on distributions as old as Ubuntu/Bionic 18.04.   However, we are attempting to upgrade the version of node we ship/use from v16 to v18,  Node dropped support for Ubuntu/Bionic with v18, so we are now proposing to do that same.

See: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk/issues/1173
And: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/43246

Before we move forward with this plan I wonder how many folks out there are running emscripten or emsdk on such older distributions of linux.   i.e. will anybody be affected by this change?

cheers,

sam

[Sam Clegg]

OK, this change is happening now.  The emsdk version of node has been updated from v16 to v18.

If you see an that look like `node: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by node)`, that means the version of linux you are running on is no longer supported by emsdk/node.  If this happens you can either update your linux version (or run in a VM with more modern glibc) or pin to an older version of emsdk.   It might be possible to also consider building node v18 from source to work around this limitation, but that is not a particularly desirable outcome since node has officially declined to continue to support older linux versions.

cheers,

sam