windows: embed a manifest #214
Closed
Conversation
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
On Windows >= Vista, not having an application manifest with a requestedExecutionLevel can cause several kinds of confusing behavior. The first and more obvious behavior is "Installer Detection" of the "User Account Control" (also known as "UAC") feature, where Windows sometimes decides (by looking at things like the file name and even sequences of bytes within the executable) that an executable is an installer and should run elevated (causing the well-known popup dialog to appear). In Git's context, subcommands such as "git patch-id" or "git update-index" fall prey to this behavior. The second and more confusing behavior is "File Virtualization". It means that when files are written without having write permission, it does not fail (as expected), but they are instead redirected to somewhere else. When the files are read, the original contents are returned, though, not the ones that were just written somewhere else. Even more confusing, not all write accesses are redirected; Trying to write to write-protected .exe files, for example, will fail instead of redirecting. In addition to being unwanted behavior, File Virtualization causes dramatic slowdowns in Git (see for instance http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/issues/detail?id=320). A third unwanted behavior of Windows >= Vista is that it lies about the Windows version when calling `GetWindowsVersionEx()`. There are two ways to prevent these unwanted behaviors: Either you embed an application manifest (which really is an XML document conforming to a specific schema) within all your executables, or you add an external manifest (a file with the same name followed by `.manifest`) to all your executables. Since Git's builtins are hardlinked (or copied), it is simpler and more robust to embed a manifest. Recent enough MSVC compilers already embed a working internal manifest, and building with mingw-w64 (which is the case in Git for Windows' SDK) does it, too, but for MinGW you have to do so by hand. In any case, it is better to be explicit about this manifest, that way changes in the compiler toolchain won't surprise us (as mingw-w64 once did when it broke `GetWindowsVersionEx()` by mistake). References: - New UAC Technologies for Windows Vista http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756960.aspx - Create and Embed an Application Manifest (UAC) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756929.aspx Signed-off-by: Cesar Eduardo Barros <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <[email protected]>
|
/submit |
|
Submitted as [email protected] |
|
This branch is now known as |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@42175ab. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@2ab57ac. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@474812b. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@9177f2d. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@b4940cd. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@1f9d433. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@fb6c40d. |
|
This patch series was integrated into next via git@875721b. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@451deac. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@cf73237. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@2e57020. |
|
This patch series was integrated into pu via git@9b9b24b. |
|
This patch series was integrated into next via git@9b9b24b. |
|
This patch series was integrated into master via git@9b9b24b. |
|
Closed via 9b9b24b. |
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
On Windows, you can embed a "manifest" into an executable that changes behavior in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. Let's embed one, to be able to define precisely what behavior we want.