[🚀 Feature]: Release Selenium Manager binaries

[bonigarcia]

Feature and motivation

Currently, the Selenium Manager binaries are shipped within the bindings. Maybe we can release it as a separate artifact with each release of Selenium, for standalone usage.

Usage example

n/a

[titusfortner]

I'm a 👎 on releasing this separately for the foreseeable future. The primary value of this feature is that users don't need to know how it works or that it even exists; Selenium just works.

[titusfortner]

Selenium Manager functionality is pretty advanced at this point.

We need to determine what is "feature complete" soon and that is going to depend somewhat on where we go with this issue.

Pros:

• Non-Selenium projects can make use of the code
• Give users more control for dynamically setting things up before running Selenium tests

Cons:

• More maintenance burden by allowing toggles that don't make sense going through the bindings;
• Code can be simplified if do not need to allow everything to be toggled
• The Pros above are mostly theoretical (no WebDriver has said they want to use this code), and there are perhaps more maintainable alternatives

Alternatives:

• Allow users who want it to download from github (either code or actions depending on how we might change release process going forward)
• Decrease coupling in the Selenium Manager classes and make it a more loose wrapper of the binary (other advantages to this); could include packaging this separately in all the languages.

[diemol]

There will always be room to add more features and flags because we are in "beta." If we move to a stable release, that would be a point where we consider the group of things we want to support, where we consider most cases to be covered, and where no more flags should be added (an exception always happens).

Now with browser downloads, I perceive we have left that beta, and it is a good time to start releasing SM.

[titusfortner]

Did we agree we wouldn't do this in our meeting in London? Or is this still on the table for Selenium 5 when we upgrade it to stable status?

Now that we have the nightly artifacts, if someone really wants to use it, they can get it, but we have the disclaimer that using it outside of the bindings is not explicitly supported.

[diemol]

We did not precisely decide this; we decided to have a separate repository to stop storing the binary on the principal repository. I would say this is on the table for Selenium 5.

[sba923]

I used to have my Update-SeleniumDriver.ps1 script (https://gist.github.com/sba923/d5406e7fded598b9c1131ddf9f099564) download from https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/raw/trunk/common/manager/windows/selenium-manager.exe, and this broke some time ago.

Is there an alternative, even temporary location to get the file from?

One of the features implemented by the script is copying msedgedriver.exe to MicrosoftWebDriver.exe.

[titusfortner]

We no longer store the binaries in the repo, but I'm curious your use case. Why not just have selenium manage it for you at runtime? Why rename it?