Sort out web3.js release blocker issues

[gnidan]

There are two outstanding issues identified in the latest web3.js that are blocking the Truffle v5 release. We have identified root causes of these and identified solutions for each.

For timeline reasons, and given sufficient confidence in the acceptability of our solutions, we plan to author PRs upstream to get these fixes into web3.js beta.37 and release Truffle v5.0.0 on a fork of web3 in the meantime.

Creating this issue to serve to track the resolution of all of this.

Summary of issues:

• Random "Could not connect to your Ethereum client" #1461 For reasons that are out of scope, Truffle does not support setting keepAlive: true for HTTP agents. The proposed web3 change is to allow keepAlive as an option in new Web3.providers.HttpProvider().

PR: web3/web3.js#2105

• Error printing emitted events of failed test, probably due to web3@v1.0.0-beta.36 #1487 Empty event logs are not decoded properly. This appears to be the same issue as getPastEvents failing to decode empty data web3/web3.js#1916. The problem seems to arise from an exception that restricts empty bytes values from being decoded for empty outputs. The proposed solution is to loosen the validation check to what appears to be more correct.

PR: web3/web3.js#2106

Thanks to @eggplantzzz and @CruzMolina, respectively, for getting to the bottom of these.

cc @nivida so you're aware.

[frozeman]

Well get them in and make a new release.

[nivida]

@gnidan Merged these PRs and should be released today. :-)

[gnidan]

Thanks so much @nivida and @frozeman!

[gnidan]

This is closable now that there is no outstanding fork. Woot!

[slraja]

I am having Truffle v5.0.3 which has web3.version as '1.0.0-beta.37' but still getting the below error :

roiDevice:Faucet roi$ truffle migrate
Error: Returned values aren't valid, did it run Out of Gas?
at ABICoder.decodeParameters (/Users/roi/.nvm/versions/node/v10.15.1/lib/node_modules/truffle/build/webpack:/~/web3-eth-abi/src/index.js:226:1)

Can someone please help ??