[Engineering] Parsoid: node 0.1x deprecated now; node 0.1x support will end March 31st, 2017

[Subramanya Sastry]

The Parsing team at the Wikimedia Foundation that develops the Parsoid 
service is deprecating support for node 0.1x. Parsoid is the service 
that powers VisualEditor, Content Translation, and Flow. If you don't 
run a MediaWiki install that uses VisualEditor, then this announcement 
does not affect you.

Node 0.10 has reached end of life on October 31st, 2016 [1] and node 
0.12 is scheduled to reach end of life December 31st, 2016 [1].

Yesterday, we released a 0.6.1 debian package [2] and a 0.6.1 npm 
version of Parsoid [3]. This will be the last release that will have 
node 0.1x support. We'll continue to provide any necessary critical bug 
fixes and security fixes for the 0.6.1 release till March 31st 2017 and 
will be completely dropping support for all node versions before node 
v4.x starting April 2017.

If you are running a Parsoid service on your wiki and are still using 
node 0.1x, please upgrade your node version by April 2017. The Wikimedia 
cluster runs node v4.6 right now and will soon be upgraded to node v6.x 
[4]. Parsoid has been tested with node 0.1x, node v4.x and node v6.x and 
works with all these versions. However, we are dropping support for node 
0.1x right away from the master branch of Parsoid. Going forward, the 
Parsoid codebase will adopt ES6 features available in node v4.x and 
higher which aren't supported in node 0.1x and will constitute a 
breaking change.

Subramanya Sastry (Subbu),
Technical Lead and Manager,
Parsing Team,
Wikimedia Foundation.

[1] Node.js Long Term Support schedule @ https://github.com/nodejs/LTS
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Releases
[3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/parsoid
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149331