Tracking / Assuring Compatibility

[jondavidjohn]

Since the plan is to provide some level of compatibility to joyent/node, are there plans to track compatibility explicitly? Providing assurance that iojs version "X" is a drop in replacement for nodejs version "Y"? At least until that compatibility explicitly breaks.

[bnoordhuis]

I don't think there are concrete plans on tracking that but you are welcome to throw up a status page. Maybe you can work something out with the maintainers of https://github.com/iojs/iojs.github.io?

[jondavidjohn]

will it be stated on release which versions of node it is targeting for compatibility?

[jbergstroem]

Running each others test suites could be one way to see how far it strays apart.

[chrisdickinson]

As @bnoordhuis mentioned, there are no concrete plans for tracking this. I don't think we're going to explictly state compatibility targets. The npm ecosystem has a stabilizing effect on the two runtimes; penalizing compatibility-breakage with APIs that are already out in the wild. That will ensure a degree of compatibility for a long time to come, if informally.

This is an issue that may come up again when we approach cutting a stable, long-term release, but for now the M.O. is "avoid breaking modules in the npm ecosystem whenever possible."