Changes required due to TextBuffer.save becoming async in Atom 1.19

[maxbrunsfeld]

Hey Nuclide team!

As I've mentioned to some of you, in Atom v1.19, we will release a major change to Atom's core text buffer data structure. As part of this change, we have made TextBuffer.save asynchronous; rather than blocking until the save is complete, it now immediately returns a Promise that resolves when the save is complete. Because of this, a few other Atom APIs that use save have similarly become async:

• Pane.close
• TextBuffer.save
• TextEditor.save
• Pane.saveItem
• Pane.saveItemAs
• Pane.saveActiveItem
• Pane.saveActiveItemAs
• Pane.saveItems
• Workspace.saveActivePaneItem
• Workspace.saveActivePaneItemAs

Effects on this package

We think this package could be impacted by this upgrade because it calls the changed methods in the following places:

• TextBuffer.save
  • here
  • here
• TextEditor.save
  • here
  • here
  • here
  • here
  • here

We found these calls using a regex search, so this list might be incomplete, and it might contain some false positives.

What to do about the change

It should be pretty easy to adjust your package code and/or tests to work with the new async behavior, and to simultaneously keep it working with older versions of Atom. Here are some examples of pull requests we opened on our bundled packages to cope with the change:

• Adjust test to work when TextBuffer.save is made async atom/autocomplete-plus#852
• Don't assume that save is synchronous in specs atom/whitespace#155
• Wait for save to complete in tests atom/symbols-view#222
• Wait for save to complete in buffer modifier indicator test atom/status-bar#193
• Tweak tests so that they work when Pane.close becomes async atom/tabs#448

Let me know if you have any questions. I'd be happy to help!

[hansonw]

Thanks @maxbrunsfeld! Our remote editors have always had a custom async save so this particular piece is pretty painless. We're now using the new APIs in 1.19 so hopefully this is good to go :)