v5.2.9 breaks on Node 4.1 and 5.9 (+more) Buffore.alloc

[mblarsen]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Bug

What is the current behavior?

Since 5.2.9 the mongo library (in current range) causes:

Uncaught TypeError: Buffer.alloc is not a function

If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce.

Here is a test case that shows the error:

for 5.9 https://travis-ci.org/mblarsen/mongoose-hidden/jobs/417260776#L628
for 4.1 https://travis-ci.org/mblarsen/mongoose-hidden/jobs/417260777#L538

Note that just above you'll see:

current URL string parser is deprecated, and will be removed in a future version. To use the new parser, pass option { useNewUrlParser: true } to MongoClient.connect.

I'm not sure that is related.

Please mention your node.js, mongoose and MongoDB version.

"mongoose": "^5.0.0",

No MongoDB depency since my code is a Mongoose library. The error occurs on Travis.

services: mongodb

[Fonger]

This is an underlying library issue.
mongodb@3.1.2+ mongodb/node-mongodb-native@759dd85
mongodb-core@3.1.1+ mongodb-js/mongodb-core@7c71e19

They use Buffer.alloc directly without any polyfill like mongoose #6829 does. Hence dropping support for node.js 4.
I'm not sure if it's intended to drop support for node.js 4. I'll try to open a pull request for this.

[mblarsen]

@Fonger, I was unable to find those issues, thanks for adding them

Anyway it is also occurring in Node 5.9 which should have Buffer.alloc right?

[Fonger]

@mblarsen That's because Buffer.alloc was actually added in 5.10 and back port to node.js 4.5. At that time, node.js 4.x was still under active development.

[vkarpov15]

Thanks for finding this @Fonger, great job 👍

[Fonger]

They merged my 2 pull requests with this comment:

We are indeed deprecating node v4 in the upcoming months, but in the meantime should in fact be using this. Thanks for the contribution!

We need to wait until mongodb-core@3.1.3 and mongodb@3.1.4 are released