Desktop toolchain does not support Node 10 currently

We’ve had some reports of contributors being unable to build Desktop in Node 10, which has mostly been down to native node modules which weren’t compatible with Node 10.

Some recent reports of users who encountered this: #5603, #5654, #5672

Note that this is a separate issue to how we build the Electron itself - we use app/.npmrc to control how the native modules the app needs are built.

I believe https://github.com/desktop/desktop/pull/5644 is the last piece of the puzzle, but it’s blocked on requiring clarification from another team about whether it’s the right approach.

[shiftkey]

Friendly bump on this because Node 10 was just transitioned to LTS, meaning Node 8 support is going to be phased out - https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v10.13.0/

[shiftkey]

Tentatively pulling this into 1.6.1 because I have a working branch, but it needs some tooling to catch regressions. I plan to open a few PRs in the coming days in this order:

• first, extract legal-eagle from the main build.ts into it’s own module and wrap it in a Promise, so it can be chained better (top-level await isn’t currently possible, as far as I’m aware)
• next, introduce a regression test for any emitted CSS in the app bundle - if it contains a $ this represents a SassScript value that wasn’t encoded properly, so the app will run but something won’t look right
• with all that in place, upgrade node-sass, catch all the new regressions, ensure it passes CI and test the app out
• test out enabling CI to use Node 10 rather than Node 8. if that works, refresh the docs to simplify things and open a PR that allows maintainers and contributors time to upgrade their setup