The tragedy of running an old Node project

> time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

> Two hours of my life gone...

Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill

It's also two hours that would have been completely avoided if the author were familiar enough with Node to know to pin the version and not try to install 4 years of updates in one shot.

Most who are here saying that X, Y, or Z ecosystem "compiles and runs" fine after 4 years are talking about the time it takes to resume an old project in a language they're very familiar with running the same dependency versions, not the time it takes to version bump a project on a language that you don't know well without actually having it running first on the old version.

I can open my 4-year-old Node projects and run them just fine, but that's because I use the tools that the ecosystem provides for ensuring that I can do so (nvm, .nvmrc, engines field in package.json).