Node.js 5.x v/s 0.10.x or 0.12.x

Question

There are two version of Node.js 5.x and 0.10.x or 0.12.x . Linked from official site https://github.com/nodesource/distributions

It is very confusion what is the difference. I was trying to install swagger-node on ubuntu-server, if I use 5.x it crease huge set for node-modules . However if I use 0.10.x it uses only four node-modules. So there is a difference.

My questions are:

1. What is a difference between 5.x v/s 0.10.x ?
2. How to upgrade from 0.10.25 to say 0.10.40 on Ubuntu ?

Answer 1

There appear to be a larger number of modules because Node 5 comes with a newer version of NPM, which tries to avoid downloading duplicate packages by "floating" many of the nested dependencies to the top-level node_modules.

Versions after 0.12.x had breaking API changes. Many of these are noted in this article: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v4.0.0/#notable-changes.

For an ongoing log of changes, see https://nodejs.org/en/blog/.