Upgrade to Electron 4

[thegecko]

Signed-off-by: thegecko rob.moran@arm.com

What it does

Upgrades the electron version used to be the latest version 4 (4.2.11) to align with VS Code usage of electron.

This also means the static versions of packaged tools available within Electron are also upgraded:

Node: 10.11.0
Chromium: 69.0.3497.106

As discussed in the dev meeting, this is a step towards adopting Electron 6. We should consider doing that once VS Code have stabilised their use of it.

@marcdumais-work Will this require CQs to be raised for the new dependency version?

How to test

Build application locally and run

Review checklist

• as an author, I have thoroughly tested my changes and carefully followed the review guidelines

Reminder for reviewers

• as a reviewer, I agree to behave in accordance with the review guidelines

cc @benoitf @akosyakov

[marcdumais-work]

Hi @thegecko,

Generally, for production dependency updates, "running" this process is good enough, assuming we do not find surprises. Can you give this a try and ping @eclipse-theia/ip-help if you have questions?

For Electron, we need to pay special attention since we went through a lot of trouble last spring to "license certify" its usage despite the bundled LGPL-licensed libffmpeg that also can include proprietary codecs. I used Gitpod to quickly test your PR for that aspect, and it looks like our mechanism, that replaces libffmpeg with a version that does not contain proprietary codecs, still works.

gitpod /workspace/theia $ cd dev-packages/electron/
gitpod /workspace/theia/dev-packages/electron $ node ./electron-codecs-test.js 
"/workspace/theia/node_modules/electron/dist/libffmpeg.so" does not contain proprietary codecs (16 found).

So I think we're good for Electron.

Ref: https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19939

[marcdumais-work]

Update: to be safe I sent an email to Sharon (with @thegecko in cc), to confirm if we should take further steps wr to the Electron update or if the above is satisfactory.

[kittaakos]

I do not mind this update, it is excellent, but I cannot verify it. What would you expect from a reviewer?

[thegecko]

What would you expect from a reviewer

I guess all we can do is check it works. Things like menus, dialogs, etc.

[kittaakos]

I guess all we can do is check it works. Things like menus, dialogs, etc.

Got it, thanks! So no bundled electron app verification is required. I will check it soon.

[kittaakos]

I have verified the electron example on macOS. I have checked:

• the main application menu,
• the context menus in the editor and the navigator.

I have tried the bare-minimum TS LS capabilities with

• validation,
• CA, and
• the outline.

I started a few new terminals and executed a few Git commands from the Git view. It worked as expected.

The Node.js version also looks good to me:

npx electron -i
> console.log(process.versions.node)
10.11.0
undefined
> .exit

Thank you! 👍

[thegecko]

Thanks @kittaakos I'll consider merging this once I've completed the process above.

[thegecko]

Thanks @marcdumais-work, I've followed the process outlined above for this PR.

All licences listed for electron 4 are permitted in the Approved Third Party Content Licenses

• Apache-2.0
• BSD-2-Clause
• BSD-3-Clause
• CC-BY-3.0
• CCO-1.0
• ISC
• MIT

Is this enough to merge or do you want to complete the email thread with Sharon?

[marcdumais-work]

All licences listed for electron 4 are permitted in the Approved Third Party Content Licenses

Thanks Rob

Is this enough to merge or do you want to complete the email thread with Sharon?

Yes, I think you can go ahead and merge