Protractor: 5.4.3 Release Without Release Notes or Changelog

[simonua]

Hi there!

I see a newly-released 5.4.3 version but there is no accompanying release note or changelog update. Also, the changelog on master still reflects the 6.0.0 version that was pulled back, IIRC.

Thanks for continuing your work in this repo!

[simonua]

In related news, the Angular 9 RC11 from last night updates protractor from 5.4.2 to 5.4.3:

https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases/tag/v9.0.0-rc.11

[Fuun347]

@juliemr @cnishina do you by any chance have any information about this? May I also ask if support for protractor will continue or is the library being slowly abandoned?

[CrispusDH]

Slowly? Several years without any steps it's not slowly.

[Fuun347]

It's far from being abandoned in terms of use. A lot of people still rely on it, me included.

[AugustusKling]

The changes from 5.4.2 to 5.4.3 are few as visible in the diff: https://github.com/angular/protractor/compare/5.4.2..5.4.3

Basically:

• their CI tool now tests with the outdated Chrome 74 (see https://github.com/angular/protractor/commit/d77731c270f5118518d0a57cee4aee97ff29a023 which is not on master)
• a compile error is fixed which broke builds in TypeScript 3.7 and later versions (see https://github.com/angular/protractor/issues/5348 )

[cnishina]

@AugustusKling Thanks for posting that.

This project as far as I know is not abandoned (quick or slow). Is it dead? Not that I am aware of. I am working on a different team (not Protractor) that uses Protractor as a dependency. We still rely on it too.

Moving forward the continued support will be provided by the Angular team. Happy testing everyone!

[Phonesis]

Can we expect Protractor 6 anytime soon?

[cnishina]

@Phonesis That's a good question for the Angular team. Most of the work we did last year was to move off of the control flow and deprecate old promise libraries. There are a few outstanding issues (as far as I know of):

• There is a parallel test bug that was not resolved
• There is some documentation that is missing

Why did we decide to not do a 6 release last year? We pulled back the release initially because it was not documented for users still on the control flow. I think there still needs some documentation around this as well as a control flow migration story.

(Also I updated this comment because I was using a different ortho keyboard and I thought I was hitting the backspace button but published my WIP comment and closed the issue)

[heathkit]

Sorry about that - I did update the changelog, but forgot to merge it: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/release-5.4/CHANGELOG.md

This was a small release to fix an issue that was preventing Angular from updating to TypeScript 3.7. Protractor 5 is the last version of Protractor that uses the deprecated WebDriver control flow (see https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/2969). Future updates to Protractor 5 will be on the 'release-5.4' branch. We don't want to break people with updates to Protractor 5, so we won't be updating the version of WebDriver it uses. Unfortunately, the latest version of Chrome uses the W3C standard actions API, which is not compatible with the version of WebDriver that we've pinned Protractor 5 to. This means that Chrome v74 is the last version of Chrome that fully works with Protractor 5. Future versions of Chrome still mostly work, just not low-level mouse control via the Actions API. That's why I updated our CI to use Chrome v74.

The master branch is Protractor 6. Unfortunately, Protractor 6 is a major breaking change. With the WebDriver control flow deprecated, tests need to be rewritten to use async/await rather than rely on the process manager. We did this in Google a couple years ago.

We don't want to actually release Protractor 6 until we have some documentation and tooling to help people migrate off the control flow. However, if you'd like to get a head start, you can disable the control flow on Protractor 5 (see https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/release-5.4/docs/control-flow.md). Once your tests pass with the control flow disabled, you should be able to update to Protractor 6.

[tfaron]

You mention we can move to Protractor 6 if our tests pass the control flow.

6.0 current has a number of issues, for example when i goto run a test I
get the following error: protractor Key:
import("./selenium-webdriver/lib/input").IKey;
There are a few open defects about this. Are 6.0 issues going to be
addressed?

On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 6:47 PM Michael Giambalvo [e-mail]
wrote:

Sorry about that - I did update the changelog, but forgot to merge it:
https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/release-5.4/CHANGELOG.md

This was a small release to fix an issue that was preventing Angular from
updating to TypeScript 3.7. Protractor 5 is the last version of Protractor
that uses the deprecated WebDriver control flow (see
SeleniumHQ/selenium#2969
https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/2969). Future updates to
Protractor 5 will be on the 'release-5.4' branch. We don't want to break
people with updates to Protractor 5, so we won't be updating the version of
WebDriver it uses. Unfortunately, the latest version of Chrome uses the W3C
standard actions API, which is not compatible with the version of WebDriver
that we've pinned Protractor 5 to. This means that Chrome v74 is the last
version of Chrome that fully works with Protractor 5. Future versions of
Chrome still mostly work, just not low-level mouse control via the Actions
API. That's why I updated our CI to use Chrome v74.

The master branch is Protractor 6. Unfortunately, Protractor 6 is a major
breaking change. With the WebDriver control flow deprecated, tests need to
be rewritten to use async/await rather than rely on the process manager.
We did this in Google a couple years ago.

We don't want to actually release Protractor 6 until we have some
documentation and tooling to help people migrate off the control flow.
However, if you'd like to get a head start, you can disable the control
flow on Protractor 5 (see
https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/release-5.4/docs/control-flow.md).
Once your tests pass with the control flow disabled, you should be able to
update to Protractor 6.

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[Fuun347]

@tfaron as far I know protractor 6.0 was retracted shortly after it was released. The current version available for protractor 6 has not been updated in 10 months and is not very unusable, again, as far as I know. I assume @heathkit was referring to update once it is officially released again in the near future.

[tfaron]

Michael Giambalvo mentioned the following so this is where some confusion
lies.

We don't want to actually release Protractor 6 until we have some
documentation and tooling to help people migrate off the control flow.
However, if you'd like to get a head start, you can disable the control
flow on Protractor 5 (see
https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/release-5.4/docs/control-flow.md).
Once your tests pass with the control flow disabled, you should be able to
update to Protractor 6.

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 1:32 PM Lyubomir Aleksiev [e-mail]
wrote:

@tfaron https://github.com/tfaron as far I know protractor 6.0 was
retracted shortly after it was released. The current version available for
protractor 6 has not been updated in 10 months and is not very unusable,
again, as far as I know. I assume @heathkit https://github.com/heathkit
was referring to update once it is officially released again in the near
future.

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[kylecordes]

It is wonderful to see an official-is declaration that the future is to move away from the old control flow and use async-await. I feel validated - we’ve already been teaching it that way for a while.

[heathkit]

Absolutely! Everyone should move off the control flow as soon as is convenient. @kylecordes Do you have any tools or documentation that might help people migrate?

We thought this was more urgent last year, since Selenium 4 doesn't support the control flow. However, now that WebDriver is a W3C standard, things seem to be changing much more slowly. I don't know when Selenium 4 is actually going to be released, but presumably when that happens people will need to migrate in a hurry.

[vsravuri]

I referred few examples available under Protractor - Reference and able to successfully migrate my code to async-await

http://www.protractortest.org/#/async-await
http://www.protractortest.org/#/page-objects

[Fuun347]

@heathkit do you have any clear idea on when we can be expecting Protractor 6 to be released? There is the constant fear from a lot of people that support for Protractor might be completely dropped soon which will leave a lot of us stranded.

[csvan]

I second the concern of @Fuun347

[Fuun347]

@csvan @heathkit I guess we're not going to get a clear answer soon?

[MathieuNo]

Can we have a clear answer from Protractor members, please ?
I currently ask some question about uncompleted PR, the bug fix delay and the answer frequency on issues. The last known release don't fix bugs and have poor content/features.

[abhinaba-ghosh]

Can we get a roadmap?