Spectron: Deprecation Announcement

[VerteDinde]

Hey folks! This spring, we posted a warning that Spectron may cease working after Electron 14 (see this pinned issue: #896 ). I wanted to post an official update and announcement:

Beginning in February 2022, Spectron will be officially deprecated by the Electron team.

Why Deprecate Spectron?

Spectron currently has no active maintainers; while we've consistently put out new releases for each new version of Electron, Spectron has had very little maintenance and improvements for well over a year. Spectron now requires a major rewrite to continue working without relying on the external remote module.

We put out a call for community help in the spring, but have unfortunately not received interest in another person maintaining Spectron full-time. Thus, we've decided to deprecate Spectron, rather than leave developers wondering about the future state of the project and possibly dependent on an unsupported project.

Deprecation Timeline

The following is our timeline toward deprecation:

• November 2021 - January 2022: The Electron team will continue to accept pull requests from the community.
• January 2022: A final version of announcement warning about Spectron's deprecation will be released.
• February 1, 2022: This repo will be marked as "archived", and no more pull requests will be accepted.

Following February 1st, 2022, we will continue to leave the Spectron repo up indefinitely, so that others are welcome to fork or use the existing code for their projects. We hope this will help provide a longer transition to any projects that still depend on Spectron.

I would like to maintain/rewrite Spectron!

There has been some discussion about forking and/or rewriting Spectron in the community, including issues like #1044 . We want to encourage that! If you have any interest in maintaining Spectron or contributing to this upstream repo, please respond to this issue.

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Thanks all! We appreciate you using Spectron and Electron. 🙇‍♀️ We understand that many of you depend on Spectron for testing your apps, and we want to make this transition as painless for you as possible. If you have any questions or concerns about the deprecation plan, please let us know here.

[suwi]

"We want to make this transition as painless for you as possible" - transition to, any recommendations?

[vladimiry]

@suwi transition to "playwright" I guess, see details in #896.

[MasterOdin]

How well does playwright handle different versions of electron? Is there a need for a similar compatibility table as spectron has for different versions of electron?

[tanshuai]

"We want to make this transition as painless for you as possible" - transition to, any recommendations?

Check Playwright doc for Electron support.

I tried Playwright by created a minimal Playwright E2E Testing Sample with CI/CT based on GitHub Actions for Electron App and it seems to work better with the latest electron.