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New Angular projects install jasmine-core ~5.7.0 but use 4.6.1 #30575
Description
Activity
- addedneeds: discussionOn the agenda for team meeting to determine next stepsOn the agenda for team meeting to determine next steps
on Jun 23, 2025 Angular users are occasionally confused about which major version of jasmine-core they're actually using
Here's an example from today: jasmine/jasmine#2066
One option is for me to do a final jasmine-core 4.x release that adds an unconditional deprecation warning, along the lines of:
You are running jasmine-core 4.x, which is unsupported and unmaintained. If you're using Karma and thought you were running a newer version, see https://jasmine.github.io/pages/faq.html#002-karma-version.
That would let users know what's going on, and hopefully shift the cost of supporting Google's decision to abandon but still ship Karma back to where it belongs.
Reacted by Alex@sgravrock bumping the version in either a patch or getting another karma-jasmine release out is something we’re open to.
The concern would be that’s it’s effectively an untested version upgrade for a dependency in a library that’s unmaintained (karma) so there’d be no real mechanism to address issues that come from the version bump.
Are you aware of anything problematic that has come up for people who have done the version override in package.json as you’ve documented in the jasmine FAQ?
That's good news. Thank you.
Are you aware of anything problematic that has come up for people who have done the version override in package.json as you’ve documented in the jasmine FAQ?
No, I haven't heard anything. As far as I can recall, all the bug reports involving Karma and Jasmine 5 have been from people who turned out to be running Jasmine 4.
5.0 was pretty light on breaking changes. The only thing I can think of that might be an issue is the switch to using
addEventListenerinstead ofwindow.onerror, but nobody's reported any problems there.The other potential factor is changes in browser support. Jasmine has never consistently treated browser support changes as semver-major, but I don't think we documented that we don't do that until around 5.3.0 or so.
4.6.0 supported:
- Safari 14-16
- Firefox 91 and 102
- Then-current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
5.12.1 supported:
- Safari 16-17
- Firefox 102, 155, 128, and 140
- Then-current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
Just a quick update here. @clydin created a PR to bump Karma to use Jasmine v5, and we're trying to work with the Web Test team to see if we can get this into a release. Jasmine v6 is out as well, so there's maybe an argument for jumping directly to there. Hopefully we can get this resolved soon and make a release happen for Karma.
Reacted by Steve Gravrock- removedneeds: discussionOn the agenda for team meeting to determine next stepsOn the agenda for team meeting to determine next steps
on Jan 26, 2026 Let's forget about the possibility of karma-jasmine being updated. I think we all know that's never going to happen, and that's fine. But why isn't Google doing anything about the double-installation issue? I already have no idea how many people actually use Jasmine 5.x or 6.x because of this, and I would hate to see the same thing happen to 7.x.
Which @angular/* package(s) are the source of the bug?
Don't known / other
Is this a regression?
Yes
Description
The package.json file generated by
ng newincludes the dev dependency"jasmine-core": "~5.7.0", but jasmine-core 4.6.1 is also installed and used to run tests in Karma.Steps to reproduce:
ng new some-nameand accept all the defaults.npm testand note the Jasmine version displayed in the browser.npm ls jasmine-core.Expected: The versions from steps 3 and 4 agree, and step 5 shows that only a single version of jasmine-core is installed.
Observed: Step 3 and 4 show different major versions, and step 5 shows that two different versions of jasmine-core are installed.
The problem is that karma-jasmine declares a dependency on jasmine-core 4.x.
ng newtries to set up the project to use jasmine-core 5.x, but it doesn't add the necessary override.Note: I'm not an Angular user, but I do maintain Jasmine. I've seen this version mismatch cause a couple of problems. One is that Angular users are occasionally confused about which major version of jasmine-core they're actually using. The other is that it makes jasmine-core download statistics pretty much useless for determining uptake of the latest major version, since an unknown but probably large portion of 5.x downloads are from Angular users who are actually still running 4.x.
Please provide a link to a minimal reproduction of the bug
No response
Please provide the exception or error you saw
Please provide the environment you discovered this bug in (run
ng version)Anything else?
No response