Session lost on restart

[Seltyk]

Steps to reproduce

1. Start Element and log in as normal
2. Quit without logging out (e.g. right click > quit on the tray, or rebooting the machine)
3. Restart Element

Outcome

What did you expect?

Quitting and restarting should maintain the current session and encryption keys.

What happened instead?

A warning about incompatible versions and your session will be permanently lost. The session is forcibly logged out.

Related issue: 1495 which is where this mess began. I have never recovered nominal functionality since that fateful hiccup earlier this week.

Operating system

Void Linux

Application version

1.11.43, 1.11.72, and 1.11.76 have all shown this issue

How did you install the app?

Build from source and execute via yarn start

Homeserver

No response

Will you send logs?

No

[MidhunSureshR]

Can you please submit screenshots and possibly logs? Not much we can do without it.

[aschaap]

Installing keytar manually via npm i -g keytar fixes this issue for me on Gentoo Linux, where element-desktop is installed using ebuilds from the PF4Public overlay (my bug describing this issue there: PF4Public/gentoo-overlay#371). I also received the warning that keytar and seshat were missing. Installing matrix-seshat in the same way did not result in it being detected by Element. I did not experience element-hq/element-web#28168 prior to this issue.

[meyou69]

I can confirm that this also exists on Fedora linux as well.

Installing keytar isn't feasible for me, since I'm using Element inside a flatpak. Is there any solution that's being proposed to fix this?

[t3chguy]

@meyou69 https://github.com/flathub/im.riot.Riot/ for help with the flatpak

[ssnailed]

The void package should work once this line is merged: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/52829/files#diff-1ec5549132a9f1aacbe6efc0d489fbf8a916f5a0f6d7227d73bbac7b84c9be66R55

[Seltyk]

Indeed, situation resolved.

[PF4Public]

It was resolved downstream. Should it be also somehow addressed in this repo?

[ssnailed]

It seems to just be a packaging issue, I don't think it's relevant to this repo.

[PF4Public]

I wouldn't consider it a packaging issue. keytar should be added into package.json here (it is essentially what yarn add keytar does) since it is a hard dependency. README should be updated to reflect that keytar native module is a must, while others are optional.

[ssnailed]

Keytar is in the package.json as a dependency for the bespoke hak build script, which isn't run by most downstream packagers.