support Atom Shell as a runtime

[Mithgol]

The following additions have to be implemented to support Atom Shell and fix #110:

• add atom-shell-related versioning
• add atom-shell-related building of native modules
• add atom-shell-relating testing of builds
• add atom-shell-related docs (mostly in README)

Note: this pull request also fixes #111 because is based on its branch.

[springmeyer]

Does atom-shell support process.versions.modules? I'm not sure I want to support atom-shell without it. The burden of the non-compatibility-promise across patch level node-webkit versions is not ideal and I'd prefer to avoid it with atom-shell.

[springmeyer]

Looks like process.versions.modules is 14 for the latest release of atom-shell (v0.16.2) so at least it gets reported. I wonder if it is meaningful.

[springmeyer]

I wonder if it is meaningful.

I've ask in electron/electron#533 (comment)

[springmeyer]

sounds like we are good to go using process.versions.modules with atom-shell as @zcbenz has confirmed he will plan to bump it independently in atom-shell when he breaks ABI (via a v8 upgrade or some other major change): electron/electron#533 (comment)

[Mithgol]

Good.

[camsoupa]

When will this be merged in?

[Mithgol]

Hard to tell; it's ≈25% complete (one checkbox out of four in my TODO list).

[kevinsawicki]

Just wanted to check in and see if there were any updates on this or if any changes were needed in Atom Shell to support this?

[springmeyer]

@kevinsawicki - yes, one more thing is needed to get this off the ground: electron/electron#1022

[johnhaley81]

electron/electron#1022 got merged in. Is there anything that I could do to help this along? This would really help the user experience with installing nodegit.

[matthewbauer]

So, this is a little bit off topic, but are there any mechanisms in place to specify that I need a dependency for use with electron/node-webkit? That is, I need node-sqlite3 but even though I'm running node, eventually it will be launched with node-webkit. Right now, I have to manually install node-sqlite3 with node-webkit options after each nom install.

[Mithgol]

@matthewbauer I don't know of any such mechanisms but the idea looks interesting.

By the way, what's your best idea of how node-pre-gyp might detect that the package is going to be used in nw.js? It would be easy to detect the nw package among the parent dependencies, for example, but not everyone uses that package.

[springmeyer]

@voodootikigod - thanks for the writeup at serialport/node-serialport#538. Have been on other projects and had not realized how much of a pain point this missing support has become. Will plan to dig into this next week and get initial "formal" electron support going asap. After I've assessed what remains to be done I'll put a call out for help testing.

[olimsaidov]

Is there any updates?

[leipert]

Is there any way supporting you with this PR?

[etiktin]

FYI, PR #175 adds basic support for Electron, so you can at least build the project locally.

[springmeyer]

Solved by #175 which has been merged and is included in the v0.6.12 release of node-pre-gyp.