deps: `npm@8`

[darcyclarke]

What?
Our team is looking to imminently cut a new major of the npm CLI that is primarily meant to drop support for node v10.x.

When?
Our hope is that this update can land within the current v16.x release line as a minor bump before it goes into Active LTS next month. We'd ideally cut this version of the CLI later this week if there wasn't any major push back; opening a PR at time of release (as per usual).

Why?
We've outlined in further detail here why this is helpful from a maintainability perspective but the tl;dr is that node v10.x is no longer maintained by the Node.js Project (thus, we'd like to drop support as well).

We're opening this issue for visibility & would love the @nodejs/tsc / @nodejs/releasers to weigh in with any feedback from their perspectives.

[Trott]

If the main motivation is to keep Node.js 10.x workarounds from becoming the equivalent of workarounds used to keep IE11 working on websites, then 💯 , please drop 10.x support at the earliest semver-permissible time.

[mcollina]

sgtm. Will there be any other semver-major changes?

[wraithgar]

The only other semver-major change is the dropping of the programmatic api. That doesn't have anything to do w/ how npm is used as a cli, only how it is used if required inside nodejs itself. The globally installed npm can't really be required to begin with (unless I suppose you used the specific path to the global npm install) so this does not affect nodejs itself.

[targos]

I have no objections to this. The only setup that I can think of which would be broken by this would be someone who installs node@16 with the bundled npm globally and somehow run the globally installed npm with node@10. It doesn't seem like something we want to support.

[richardlau]

No objections from me.

[mhdawson]

No objections from me.

[richardlau]

For the record we discussed this in today's Release WG meeting and there were no objections/concerns raised.

[danielleadams]

@darcyclarke this sounds good. how quickly are you looking to get this out?

[MylesBorins]

@danielleadams tentatively as soon as next week

[csvan]

Noticed npm@8 is is out: https://github.com/npm/cli/releases/tag/v8.0.0

Is it still possible for this to be included in Node 16 before it goes LTS? I believe it would be greatly appreciated by the community. Thanks for all your hard work!

[richardlau]

@csvan That is the plan and it's currently included in the proposal for Node.js 16.11.0: #40319