Building packages on OS X silently fails during ncp call

[davej]

Using electron-packager v5.1.0 on OS X 10.10.5 and Node v4.1.1

➜ electron-packager . MyApp --overwrite --platform=darwin --arch=x64 --version=0.33.6

Packaging app for platform darwin x64 using electron v0.33.6

No errors, it just exits about 10 seconds after displaying the message "Packaging app for platform darwin x64 using electron v0.33.6" and there are no files written to my CWD.

I realise that this is very sparse on info but I'm not sure what other details I can give. When I last ran this command about three weeks ago it worked fine.

[malept]

Can you bisect which released version of electron-packager is the last one that works for you?

[davej]

I believe I was using 5.1.0 when it worked before... I tried moving back to an earlier version anyway but it still didn't work. Could this be something related to something in my app code base (I see symlink issues are mentioned a lot, I have symlinked modules).

[malept]

Could you try specifying an --out directory?

Otherwise, I think we're going to need reproduction steps on a minimal Electron app.

[davej]

Still isn't working with --out.

I'm doing a bit of debugging, seems to be failing here, the callback function (cb) is never fired.

[malept]

Hmm. Very odd. I noticed that Travis CI only tests under Node 0.12. Let me add some more Node versions, and see if that surfaces anything.

[davej]

Possibly related to AvianFlu/ncp#98?

[malept]

Possibly, but that's a really vague bug report with no follow-up.

[davej]

Yup.

FYI, tried a couple of other node versions, I'm getting the same issue with Node-v0.12.2 and iojs-v2.0.1.

[davej]

The actual copying of files works fine by the way, all the files are copied correctly, it's just that the callback isn't fired.

I put the callback in a setTimeout just to get it working and the app packaged itself correctly and runs as expected.

  var ncpCallbackFired = false
  ncp(opts.dir, appPath, {filter: userIgnoreFilter(opts), dereference: true}, function(err) {
    ncpCallbackFired = true;
    cb(err);
  });
  // callback above isn't being fired by ncp for some reason,
  // so call it synthetically after 20 secs if it hasn't been fired.
  // https://github.com/maxogden/electron-packager/issues/150
  setTimeout(function() {
    if (!ncpCallbackFired) {
      cb(null);
    }
  }, 20000);

[davej]

Just want to mention that a number of people have found ncp inconsistent and buggy, also it isn't being actively maintained anymore: AvianFlu/ncp#100

I also noticed that the fs-extra module dropped ncp because of bugs surrounding non-firing/double-firing of callbacks.

[max-mapper]

we should switch to using https://www.npmjs.com/package/tar-fs: tarfs.pack().pipe(tarfs.extract()), its like JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(obj)) but for filesystems :)

[malept]

We should open a new issue for that.

[jlord]

Looks like this was intended to be closed in #150.