Conversion to ES6 should have resulted in a major version change

Due to ES6 conversion, this module no longer works in Node.js environments < 4. As a result, while electron is perfectly usable in earlier environments, downloading electron no longer works. This is causing builds to fail during the npm install process.

The workaround here, in order to support earlier environments, would be to either a) revert back to ES5 or b) use babel or some other transpiler to transpile the ES6 code to ES5 pre-publish.

[malept]

Personally, I’d be more inclined to yank 2.2.0 and publish 3.0.0.

[kgryte]

@malept

Re: b. Fair enough. Although nothing about checksum support demands ES2015 features and thus necessitates breaking changes.

Re: a) and electron-userland/electron-prebuilt#189. I fail to see why dropping support for prior Node.js versions is a good thing. 0.12 is still an officially supported version through the end of the year. 0.10 (officially supported until October) still has considerable use in enterprise deployments. In particular, electron should not be forced to undergo a breaking change simply to accommodate this module’s decision to only support ES2015 environments.

Re: c. While I can sympathize with the desire to clean-up and modernize a code base, ultimately that needs to be balanced with a code base’s use in the broader context. Here, that context is electron, which should be capable of being installed alongside any version of Node.js >=0.10. And I’d argue that electron and its supported install environments should dictate the supported install environments of associated tooling, not the other way around. So, in this case, the decision to clean-up should consider this constraint and view using sthg like babel as part of the cost of modernization.