Electron = mc²

Improvements for all users:

• We upgraded a lot of dependencies and especially Electron which was upgraded
  to v5.0.0. This brings in Node v12.0.0. They should bring performance and
  stability improvements.
• We improved the stability of the ordering and identification of changes
  fetched from the remote Cozy. This should reduce the number of unmergeable
  changes and conflicts arising from those situations. This is especially true
  when complex moves were synchronised with the remote Cozy (e.g. moving a
  folder from inside a moved folder).
• We fixed a few minor UI issues like long filenames which were not correctly
  ellipsized in the synced files list.
• When upgrading Electron to v5.0.0, we broke the onboarding process because of
  a new security restriction in Chromium (which is packaged with Electron)
  preventing us from redirecting to the folder selection window at the end of
  the OAuth authentication process with your Cozy.
  We're now manually loading the folder selection window after the
  authentication instead of following the redirect URI sent back by the Cozy.
• Our remote changes watcher tries to recreate the changes that were executed
  on the remote Cozy from the resulting documents and the old versions we have
  locally. We found out that we were not correctly detecting and thus handling
  complex hierarchy changes like:
  • child only moves (i.e. we detect a move on a folder descendant which is due
    to its ancestor move and should not result in any local action)
  • moves inside move (i.e. renaming/moving the child of a moved parent within
    that same parent)
  • moves from inside a move (i.e. moving the child of a moved parent outside
    that parent)
    Handling those changes correctly should result in a lot less unmerged changes
    and their consequences.
• After fixing the remote changes identification logic, we found out that our
  sorting algorithm (necessary to avoid potential collisions when applying them
  locally) was not stable and the resulting order depended greatly on the
  original changes and their order.
  We separated the criterias on which we sort the changes to come up with 2
  sorting algorithms called on after the other so the result of each one is
  predictable and thus the end result too. This should prevent some conflicts
  and mis-applied changes.

Improvements for MacOS users:

• In an attempt to prevent losing a working config, we decided to use a write
  technique called copy-on-write. This proved itself unnecessary and even lead
  to issues for some users when they had both a working config and a temporary
  config file. We stopped using this technique without losing the safety of an
  atomic write via a temporary config file.
• When launching the application, we do what we call an initial scan of your
  synced directory to list all its documents and try to detect changes that were
  made since the last time the application was running. It is a complex task
  which does not behave in the same way the live watching does and we were not
  always ordering the resulting changes in the correct order, resulting in
  incorrect changes or unmerged changes. We designed a specific sorting
  algorithm for this phase to stabilize this situation which should result in
  less errors during the application startup.
• Apple now requires a notarization step for apps to be installed on newer
  versions of macOS. With this process, Apple certifies that Cozy Desktop
  does not contain any known malware and macOS will let you install our app
  without having to tinkle with your security parameters.
• The way we store documents metadata (e.g. their paths) means we have to modify
  the saved metadata of the moved folder itself but also all its descendants
  (i.e. so their paths in our database reflects their path on the filesystem).
  We found an issue in our moves handling logic that prevented us from detecting
  moves from inside a move (i.e. we move a folder to another location from a
  parent that was just moved as well).
  We're now detecting them correctly which means those changes will now be
  propagated to the remote Cozy as expected.
• We found out that the libraries we use to watch the changes done to your files
  on your filesystem could sometimes fire events with the wrong type. Indeed,
  we've seen events for the addition of files with a directory type and
  vice-versa.
  We rely on this type to decide which actions to run so we're now verifying
  that the type we received is correct before we proceed.

Improvements for GNU/Linux users:

• Upgrading Electron, the desktop applications framework upon which Cozy Desktop
  is built, means upgrading the Node and Chromium versions shipped with it.
  Starting with Electron v4, when libappindicator is available and installed on
  your distribution, the systray icon will be displayed via this library. This
  means that the icon won't respond to left clicks anymore. To mitigate this
  situation, we decided to add the "Show Application" menu entry in the context
  menu for all distributions. This context menu can be displayed via a right
  click on the systray icon.

See also known issues.

Happy syncing!