v4 Roadmap

General stuff

v3 may have been short lived, cuz of how long time we dragged out on esm. We already have a milestone for v4 with few issues in it. NodeJS v12 will soon end its LTS version in April, so i was thinking of dropping support any prior version and remove all the hacks we have around it in the current branch.

I was thinking about setting the lowest supported node version to v14.17.0 not 14.13.1 as we have today that is meant for ESM why? cuz http.request supports signal in v14.17.0 then we can also use finalizers that got introduced in v14.6.0 and cleanup the response (and the cloned res) when it’s forgotten and not consumed

Is there any bug/issue/features we would like to finish or complete before we branch out of v3 and start working on v4?

• General
  • Create a v4 update guide
  • create some “next/beta” release on npm
• signal
  • Start depending on NodeJS own built in AbortController
  • #1439
  • #1469
  • forward this signal to http.request(url { signal })
  • remove the abort & finalize logic and use this 👆 abort signal to abort the request.
• Headers
  • #1484
  • remove some own test around headers (as ☝️ runs against wpt, + some own misc test)
• whatwg streams
  • start depend on web-stream-polyfill (as fetch-blob have start depending on it)
  • #1213
  • https://github.com/whatwg/fetch/issues/1291
  • convert node’s incoming http stream and the unpacking br, deflate logic to a whatwg stream
  • set .body to be a whatwg stream
• URLSearchParam
  • remove isURLSearchParam and only accept global URLSearchParam introduced in v10
• package
  • Drop support for v12 and set target version to ^ 14.17.0 || >=16.0.0"?
  • #1347
• cleanup
  • #1223
  • remove the current stream clone logic and use ReadableStream.prototype.tee instead
  • #1486
  • #1485
  • remove support for size option (fixes #1438)
  • make use of finalizers to cleanup
  • remove some old test cases
  • We can also start using optional chaining

cc @bitinn @TimothyGu @jkantr @gr2m @Richienb @ronag @LinusU

[Richienb]

If all goes to plan, node-fetch will no longer be needed by 30/04/2024, the date when Node.js v16 is EOL. Until then, we’d want to backport whatever v18 does to implement fetch.

[regseb]

Can the pull request https://github.com/node-fetch/node-fetch/pull/1473 be included in v4? It changes the default value of the Connection header by replacing close by keep-alive.