3 ms·

It's not unwanted. Not automatically elevating would break older installers written in a pre-Vista era, or written by developers who don't bother embedding a ma

by mickeyp 13y ago

It's not unwanted. Not automatically elevating would break older installers written in a pre-Vista era, or written by developers who don't bother embedding a manifest telling Windows that it requires elevation. Imagine being a user upgrading from XP to Vista/7 and finding that all their old programs no longer install as they fail to write to Program Files -- something that you could get away with in older versions of Windows where people used admin privileges for everything. And yet that very problem would go away for almost everyone, everywhere, by simply elevating programs named setup or install. Seems like a perfectly sane way to make things backwards compatible.

kabdib 13y ago
Unwanted. 1) Write a little, one-off initialization script (I forget what it did -- probably copied a few files from point A to point B). Expect this task to take about five minutes. 2) Four hours later you discover that merely calling that stupid little script 'setup.cmd' caused all kinds of UAC havoc to ensue. Bang head against desk. So, now I know. But it sure was counter-intuitive, and (I suggest) more than a little ham-handed on Microsoft's part. Don't get me started about significant trailing spaces in environment variables (another little gift of non-intuitive behavior in the MS environment).
- pcwalton 13y ago
  > 1) Write a little, one-off initialization script (I forget what it did -- probably copied a few files from point A to point B). Expect this task to take about five minutes. The number of users who run legacy installers and expect them to work exceeds the number of users who write "little, one-off installation scripts" by several orders of magnitude.
enqk 13y ago
It is unwanted, broken and stupid to hardcode policy behaviour on the filename of executables. I lost a few hours to this because it's so quirky and easy to forget. This happened during the compilation of a certain library, which created an install.exe program to move files around the filesystem. That stupid UAC dialog was not even kicking-in and basically the copying just died.
elehack 13y ago
And break Cygwin/MSYS/<*nix compat layer> that provides install(1).

by mickeyp 13y ago

kabdib 13y ago

Unwanted. 1) Write a little, one-off initialization script (I forget what it did -- probably copied a few files from point A to point B). Expect this task to take about five minutes. 2) Four hours later you discover that merely calling that stupid little script 'setup.cmd' caused all kinds of UAC havoc to ensue. Bang head against desk. So, now I know. But it sure was counter-intuitive, and (I suggest) more than a little ham-handed on Microsoft's part. Don't get me started about significant trailing spaces in environment variables (another little gift of non-intuitive behavior in the MS environment).

pcwalton 13y ago
> 1) Write a little, one-off initialization script (I forget what it did -- probably copied a few files from point A to point B). Expect this task to take about five minutes. The number of users who run legacy installers and expect them to work exceeds the number of users who write "little, one-off installation scripts" by several orders of magnitude.

enqk 13y ago

It is unwanted, broken and stupid to hardcode policy behaviour on the filename of executables. I lost a few hours to this because it's so quirky and easy to forget. This happened during the compilation of a certain library, which created an install.exe program to move files around the filesystem. That stupid UAC dialog was not even kicking-in and basically the copying just died.

elehack 13y ago

And break Cygwin/MSYS/<*nix compat layer> that provides install(1).