Build fails on Node.js versions newer than 18.17.1

[arhowe00]

npm install fails on Node.js versions newer than v18.17.1, including all recent LTS releases (v20, v22+).

The installation process requires compiling the canvas package from source, which fails for two primary reasons:

• The version of canvas used in the dependency tree relies on V8 APIs that were removed in newer versions of Node.js. This results in C++ compilation errors like error: no template named 'CopyablePersistentTraits' in namespace 'v8'.
• The build script requires Python's distutils module, which was removed in Python 3.12+. This causes a ModuleNotFoundError on systems with modern Python installations.

The only successful build environment requires pinning the Node.js version to 18.17.1 and ensuring the Python environment includes setuptools, and upgrading vite and vuetify. Not sure if this will break things, but the build works.

[jcfr]

The version of volview associated with the template is Kitware/VolView@2e361bf[^1] which is from June 2024. This should be updated to a more recent one.

Ideally, a scheduled workflow should be added to this repo to update the associated version of volview once a week.

To understand which exact dependencies bring canvas, consider also running yarn why canvas (or npm equivalent)

References:

• https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas

[floryst]

Updating the VolView version will help. We removed the canvas direct dependency a while back (though not sure if there's a transitive dependency).