Comment 43 for bug 1794589

I think the advice is harder to follow than it looks. Many node packages require libssl-1.0-dev,
and you can't install them on a system used to develop c/c++ apps that require libssl-dev.
To wit:

$ sudo apt install -s node-websocket libssl-dev
...
 node-websocket : Depends: nodejs-dev (>= 8.9.3~dfsg-11ubuntu1~) but it is not going to be installed
                  Depends: libjs-websocket but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

So it's more like "you can't count on being able to use xenial's nodejs on any system that
has to build stuff against libssl-dev", which is pretty traumatic.

The situation's better on cosmic. Backporting cosmic's nodejs to xenial isn't a great fix,
though, because it has a different soname, so any packages that need node's shared library
have to be rebuilt. And that breaks our user apps. As a workaround I'm using upstream's nodejs 8 on xenial, that seems to sidestep the openssl problem without causing the major version number problem.