Patchwork: Update electron (electron 4 is EOL)

[Powersource]

So electron 4 was released in December, but they're ending support already apparently https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-7-0#end-of-support-for-4xy

[ndarilek]

Would love it if this was fixed. I'm blind, have wanted to use SSB for a while, and for a whole host of reasons, accessible GUI apps are easier to use than command line apps in certain situations. Until fairly recently, Electron/Chromium have been inaccessible under Linux, but ever since 6 or so that has changed. It's still a bit rocky, but should be good enough for me to use something like Patchwork.

Thanks! Looking forward to putting this through its paces when it hits master, and to contributing back accessibility fixes.

[christianbundy]

Thanks @ndarilek! I've got Patchwork upgraded to Electron 6 in #1199, just waiting on some more feedback before a merge. A brief warning though: I think Patchwork has some big accessibility problems that may not be resolved with the Electron 6. To be candid, these may require structural changes at the root of Patchwork, and you may have an easier time using another client. If there's a better place to chat about this (Matrix? IRC? Audio call?) I'd be happy to have a chat and make sure you're set up with a client that works for you.

Either way, I'm super hopeful that the Electron 6 upgrade will solve the major accessibility problems and I'm really hyped about your offer to contribute back fixes.

[ndarilek]

Your comment re: accessibility got cut off. Not sure if you meant to
write more.

However, I tried launching Patchwork by appending
"--force-renderer-accessibility" to the start script, and it didn't
work. On a whim, I bumped the Electron version to 7.1, tried again, and
it works nicely! At least in so far as I can read the contents with
Orca--I'm sure I'll need to make some tweaks, but this is a significant
improvement over nothing at all. :) Had some issues when I attempted
bumping the version from 4 to 6 a month or so back, but the bump from 6
to 7 seems to work.

Any reason 7.1 wasn't used? Was 6.1 what was out when the PR landed? 7.1
at least launches, so it may be a worthwhile upgrade.

In any case, I'll start looking for accessibility improvements to
contribute.

[christianbundy]

Oops, sorry -- I accidentally posted early and then edited it in the GitHub UI.

Electron 7 worked fine in my testing, but all of the cryptography functions were very slow because our libsodium native modules don't yet support the latest Electron ABI. When this happens we fall back to JavaScript cryptography, which is slower, so generally we've tried to avoid releasing any versions without native module support.

If you see "falling back to JavaScript cryptography" or similar in the command-line output, it's almost always because the modules we're using don't support the latest Electron ABI.

[ndarilek]

OK, that's fair. I'll try making accessibility improvements and will
keep the Electron 7 change local.

Quick question while here, slightly related to accessibility. Would you
mind pointing me to where the general shape of the main page post-launch
is rendered? I.e. where the menu, feed, etc. is rendered? I'm sure I can
trace the flow better once I've found the entrypoint, but I'm not
familiar with this particular view framework and am trying to get a few
quick a11y wins under my belt.

Thanks, I'll stop co-opting this issue now. :)