Prerequisites need to be updated

[fipro78]

The documentation says that the prerequisites are Node.js >= 18.17.0 and < 21

But trying to run a build created with the latest version of Theia fails with the following message:

error [email protected]: the engine "node" is incompatible with this module. expected version ">=22.12.0".

So it seems a transitive dependency introduced an update in the required Node.js version.
This should be updated in the docs.

[msujew]

@fipro78 I don't think the prerequisites should be updated, as our Electron version still requires us to use 18.17.0 (as that's the node version that comes with our Electron version). Instead, we should probably adjust our version constraint for node-abi (assuming that's even possible for us).

[msujew]

@fipro78 On second look, how do you even get node-abi to that version? We only depend on [email protected], but that uses node-abi": "^3.0.0", so version 4.1.0 should not be retrieved by Theia. Can you run yarn why node-abi or npm list node-abi?

[fipro78]

This is the output:

theia@ /workspaces/vscode_theia_cookbook/theia
└─┬ [email protected] -> ./browser-app
  ├─┬ @theia/[email protected]
  │ └─┬ @theia/[email protected]
  │   ├─┬ [email protected]
  │   │ └── [email protected]
  │   └── [email protected]
  └─┬ @theia/[email protected]
    └─┬ [email protected]
      └─┬ [email protected]
        └── [email protected] deduped

I have created I new project using yo theia-extension and used No Extension (just a Theia application)

[msujew]

Huh, apparently we're using * as a version for node-abi:

theia/dev-packages/application-manager/package.json

Line 52 in afde78f

"node-abi": "*",

I would assume it should reuse the version that is available from electron-rebuild, but it does not seem to do that. We should stick to a specific version. cc @tsmaeder.

[tsmaeder]

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't find any uses of the node-abi package in @theia/application-manager. Why do we have that dependency?

[msujew]

Maybe a leftover from some previous work? Anyway, we should probably remove it, if it's not directly in use.