See discussion at https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier/pull/1124#issuecomment-794751514 :
> @TheCleric I was about to merge this, then reconsidered one little thing (yes I wrote "little", I'm not reconsidering this whole thing 😅).
>
> I'm re-considering having the extra flag. I'm not so sure this will harm a lot of use cases. I'd like to 1. merge this PR, 2. immediately follow up with a small commit removing the flag & adjusting api.md, 3. release with the change well-documented / asking for feedback if this is problematic to anyone. (I'm not asking you any extra work, and like leaving an in-tree commit trace of considering the flag). If people complain with a valid reason, we'll restore the flag with a quick revert, else we're happy with one less flag and a reasonably-handled breaking change.
>
> Thoughts / objections?
Answered by:
> That seems reasonable to me.
>
> [discussion on an extra structured way to pass flags]
This PR adds better Typescript support when using the Node module directly:
1. Generate type declarations when running `tsc`
2. Created the `NativefierOptions` type for the `buildNativefierApp` function instead of using `any`
## Breaking changes
- Require **Node >= 8.10.0 and npm 5.6.0**
- Move to **Electron 8.1.1**.
- That's it. Lots of care went into breaking CLI & programmatic behavior
as little as possible. **Please report regressions**.
- Known issue: build may fail behind a proxy. Get in touch if you use one:
https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/issues/907#issuecomment-596144768
## Changes summary
Nativefier didn't get much love recently, to the point that it's
becoming hard to run on recent Node, due to old dependencies.
Also, some past practices now seem weird, as better expressible
by modern JS/TS, discouraging contributions including mine.
Addressing this, and one thing leading to another, came a
bigger-than-expected revamp, aiming at making Nativefier more
**lean, stable, future-proof, user-friendly and dev-friendly**,
while **not changing the CLI/programmatic interfaces**. Highlights:
- **Require Node>=8**, as imposed by many of our dependencies. Node 8
is twice LTS, and easily available even in conservative Linux distros.
No reason not to demand it.
- **Default to Electron 8**.
- **Bump** all dependencies to latest version, including electron-packager.
- **Move to TS**. TS is great. As of today, I see no reason not to use it,
and fight interface bugs at runtime rather than at compile time.
With that, get rid of everything Babel/Webpack.
- **Move away from Gulp**. Gulp's selling point is perf via streaming,
but for small builds like Nativefier, npm tasks are plenty good
and less dependency bloat. Gulp was the driver for this PR: broken
on Node 12, and I didn't feel like just upgrading and keeping it.
- Add tons of **verbose logs** everywhere it makes sense, to have a
fine & clear trace of the program flow. This will be helpful to
debug user-reported issues, and already helped me fix a few bugs.
- With better simple logging, get rid of the quirky and buggy
progress bar based on package `progress`. Nice logging (minimal
by default, the verbose logging mentioned above is only used
when passing `--verbose`) is better and one less dependency.
- **Dump `async` package**, a relic from old callback-hell early Node.
Also dump a few other micro-packages unnecessary now.
- A first pass of code **cleanup** thanks to modern JS/TS features:
fixes, simplifications, jsdoc type annotations to types, etc.
- **Remove GitHub integrations Hound & CodeClimate**, which are more
exotic than good'ol'linters, and whose signal-to-noise ratio is too low.
- Quality: **Add tests** and add **Windows + macOS CI builds**.
Also, add a **manual test script**, helping to quickly verify the
hard-to-programatically-test stuff before releases, and limit regressions.
- **Fix a very small number of existing bugs**. The goal of this PR was
*not* to fix bugs, but to get Nativefier in better shape to do so.
Bugfixes will come later. Still, these got addressed:
- Add common `Alt`+`Left`/`Right` for previous/next navigation.
- Improve #379: fix zoom with `Ctrl` + numpad `+`/`-`
- Fix pinch-to-zoom (see https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/issues/379#issuecomment-598612128 )
