Recommended upgrade path to `node16` for action authors?

Describe the enhancement

(Sorry this is more of a request for guidance; didn’t see a better issue category)

If there is no change to the action interface, nor to its code, nor does it target post-Node.js 12 features, is it safe to bump runtime in action.yml to node16 without updating major version, and without breaking Node.js 12 customers?

I guess in other words, does the runner safely fallback to Node.js 12 even if runtime is marked as node16? It would be unfortunate to ask users to update major version (and render a lot of documentation obsolete) when none of the code being executed has changed.

I see for at least some actions (e.g. actions/setup-go, actions/setup-python) the runtime change was matched with a major version update, but not sure if that was solely due to the runtime change.

Code Snippet N/A

Additional information N/A

[fhammerl]

Hi @hoffa, thanks for taking an active interest in upgrading you actions to node16! Short answer: The major version bump is highly recommended, but it is not a technical requirement for the action to run on node16.

Check the documentation for generic versioning guidelines.

Long answer

While inconvenient in some cases, bumping a major version is recommended, at least from a semantic versioning perspective. Bumping the Node version also inherits any and all of Node’s breaking changes between v12 and v16. Also, actions/setup-go and actions/setup-python also took this as an opportunity to introduce other breaking changes, specifically, removing deprecated features, as part of the major version bump.

On the other hand, for many actions, the transition between node12 and node16 can be entirely seamless, and ultimately the final versioning decision is in the hands of the action author.

[Andrey5045]

Here is my build.yml What do I have to change here to upgrade node 12 to 16?

name: Build and Deliver

on: workflow_dispatch: inputs: AppVersion: description: ‘Version Name’ required: true default: ‘1.0’ Solar2DBuild: description: ‘Solar2D Build Number’ required: true default: ‘2020.3635’ Xcode: description: ‘Xcode Version’ required: true default: ‘12.3’

env: DEVELOPER_DIR: /Applications/Xcode_${{ github.event.inputs.Xcode }}.app/Contents/Developer # this forces Xcode version APP_VERSION: ${{ github.event.inputs.AppVersion }} S2D_BUILD_NAME: ${{ github.event.inputs.Solar2DBuild }}

jobs: build: runs-on: macos-10.15 steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Build and Deliver run: Util/build.sh env: CERT_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.CertPassword }} APPLE_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.AppleUser }} APPLE_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.ApplePassword }} APPLE_TEAM_ID: ${{ secrets.AppleTeamId }}