This reverts commit 0615767224
("Windows installer: remove explicit InstallScope setting"), albeit
with different comments.
The original change worked around a Windows security vulnerability
(CVE-2023-21800), but also resulted in a rather broken installer.
It turns out this isn't actually necessary after all to make the
installer behave in the expected way in the default case (giving a UAC
prompt and installing systemwide). And I'm told it has undesirable
consequences in more complicated cases, which I'm not expert enough in
MSI to fully understand.
The number of people has been steadily increasing who read our source
code with an editor that thinks tab stops are 4 spaces apart, as
opposed to the traditional tty-derived 8 that the PuTTY code expects.
So I've been wondering for ages about just fixing it, and switching to
a spaces-only policy throughout the code. And I recently found out
about 'git blame -w', which should make this change not too disruptive
for the purposes of source-control archaeology; so perhaps now is the
time.
While I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to remove all the
trailing spaces from source lines (on the basis that git dislikes
them, and is the only thing that seems to have a strong opinion one
way or the other).
Apologies to anyone downstream of this code who has complicated patch
sets to rebase past this change. I don't intend it to be needed again.
With this change, we stop expecting to find putty.chm alongside the
executable file. That was a security hazard comparable to DLL
hijacking, because of the risk that a malicious CHM file could be
dropped into the same directory as putty.exe (e.g. if someone ran
PuTTY from their browser's download dir)..
Instead, the standalone putty.exe (and other binaries needing help)
embed the proper CHM file within themselves, as a Windows resource,
and if called on to display the help then they write the file out to a
temporary location. This has the advantage that if you download and
run the standalone putty.exe then you actually _get_ help, which
previously didn't happen!
The versions of the binaries in the installer don't each contain a
copy of the help file; that would be extravagant. Instead, the
installer itself writes a registry entry pointing at the proper help
file, and the executables will look there.
Another effect of this commit is that I've withdrawn support for the
older .HLP format completely. It's now entirely outdated, and
supporting it through this security fix would have been a huge pain.
I had previously left the platform field (in line 7 of the installer
database's SummaryInformation table) set at "x86" instead of any value
you might expect such as "Arm" or "Arm64", because I found that an MSI
file with either of the latter values was rejected by WoA's msiexec as
invalid.
It turns out this is because I _also_ needed to upgrade the installer
database schema version to a higher value than I even knew existed:
apparently the problem is that those platform fields aren't present in
the older schema. A test confirms that this works.
Unfortunately, WiX 3 doesn't actually know _how_ to write MSIs with
those platform values. But that's OK, because diffing the x86 and x64
MSIs against each other suggested that there were basically no other
changes in the database tables - so I can just generate the installer
as if for x64, and then rewrite that one field after installer
construction using GNOME msitools to take apart the binary file
structure and put it back together. (Those are the same tools I'm
using as part of my system for running WiX on Linux in the first
place.)
This commit introduces a script to do that post-hoc bodging, and calls
it from Buildscr. I've also changed over the choice of Program Files
folder for the Arm installers so that it's ProgramFiles64Folder
instead of ProgramFilesFolder - so now the Windows on Arm installer
doesn't incongruously default to installing in C:\Program Files (x86)!
I expected this to be nightmarish because WiX 3 doesn't know about the
Windows on Arm platform at all. Fortunately, it turns out that it
doesn't have to: testing on a borrowed machine I find that Windows on
Arm's msiexec.exe is quite happy to take MSIs whose platform field in
the _SummaryInformation table says "Intel".
In fact, that seemed to be _all_ that my test machine would accept: I
tried taking the MSI apart with msidump, putting some other value in
there (e.g. "Arm64" or "Arm") and rebuilding it with msibuild, and all
I got was messages from msiexec saying "This installation package is
not supported by this processor type."
So in fact I just give WiX the same -arch x86 option that I give it
for the real 32-bit x86 Windows installer, but then I point it at the
Arm binaries, and that seems to produce a viable MSI. There is the
unfortunate effect that msiexec forcibly sets the default install
location to 'Program Files (x86)' no matter how I strive to make it
set it any other way, but that's only cosmetic: the programs _run_
just fine no matter which Program Files directory they're installed
into (and I know this won't be the first piece of software that
installs itself into the wrong one). Perhaps some day we can find a
way to do that part better.
On general principles of caution (and of not really wanting to force
Arm machines to emulate x86 code at all), the Arm versions of the
installers have the new DllOk=no flag, so they're pure MSI with no
embedded DLLs.
This arranges that we can build a completely pure MSI file, which
doesn't depend on any native code at install time. We don't lose much
by doing this - only the option to pop up the README file at the end
of installation, and validation of the install directory when you
select it from a file browser.
My immediate use for this is that I want to use it for installers that
will run on Windows on Arm. But it also seems to me like quite an
attractive property in its own right - no native code at all running
at install time would be an _especially_ good guarantee that that code
can't be hijacked by DLLs in the download directory. So I may yet
decide that the features we're losing are not critical to _any_
version of the MSI, and throw them out unconditionally.
I've also been experimenting recently with running Wix on Linux under
Mono, rather than running it on Windows in the obvious way. Wix under
Mono insists on forward slashes in pathnames, and it turns out that
Wix on Windows doesn't object to them either, so I can safely change
them over unconditionally and then my installer source will work in
both modes.
This is apparently the other half of what we should have done when we
called SetCurrentProcessExplicitAppUserModelID at run time: it
associates to PuTTY's Start Menu shortcut the same identifier that we
give to the running PuTTY process, so that jump lists saved under the
latter will be visible to users mousing over the former.
I've also done the same thing to the desktop shortcut, just in case
that does anything useful.
The MSI format has a fixed field for target architecture, so there's
no way to build a single MSI that can decide at install time whether
to install 32-bit or 64-bit (or both). The best you can do along those
lines, apparently, is to have two MSI files plus a bootstrap .EXE that
decides which of them to run, and as far as I'm concerned that would
just reintroduce all the same risks and annoyances that made us want
to migrate away from .EXE installers anyway.
Uses the BUILDDIR mechanism I added to Makefile.vc in commit
d3db17f3e.
This change is purely internal to Buildscr, and shouldn't affect the
output of a build. It paves the way to have Buildscr run multiple
Windows builds using different compilers, by putting each one in a
different subdirectory so that their outputs don't collide.
The old README.txt instructed you to manually update PATH if you
wanted to run pscp from a command prompt. But the MSI installer can do
that automatically, so the wording needs tweaks. And now that we're
actually launching README (at least optionally) from the installer UI,
it's more important to not make it look silly.
This is a thing that the Inno Setup installer did, and that I didn't
get round to replicating when I rushed out the initial MSI in a hurry.
I've checked that this doesn't prevent unattended installation by
administrators: running 'msiexec /q /i putty-whatever.msi' as
administrator still installs silently after this change, without
popping up the README unexpectedly on anyone's desktop as a side
effect.
(I _think_ - but I'm still a long way from an MSI expert - that that's
because /q turns off the whole UI part of the MSI system, and the
loading of README is actually triggered by the transition away from
the final UI dialog box, which we now never visit in the first place.)
I rushed out the MSI in too much of a hurry to sort out this kind of
thing, but now we've got leisure to reconsider, I think it's better
behaviour not to clutter everyone's desktops unless specifically asked
to.
It would be nicer if we could also make this show up as the icon for
the .msi file itself when viewed in Explorer, but apparently nothing
can change that. But at least this still gives us _some_ use for the
cardboard-box icon :-)
Mostly this is a reaction to the reports of Inno Setup having a DLL
hijacking vulnerability. But also, the new installer has several other
nice features that our Inno Setup one didn't provide: it can put the
PuTTY install directory on PATH automatically, and it supports
completely automatic and silent install/uninstall via 'msiexec /q'
which should make it easier for sysadmins to roll out installation in
large organisations. Also, it just seems like good sense to be using
Windows's own native packaging system (or closest equivalent) rather
than going it alone.
(And on the developer side, I have to say I like the fact that WiX
lets me pass in the version number as a set of command-line #define-
equivalents, whereas for Inno Setup I had to have Buildscr apply Perl
rewriting to the source file.)
For the moment, I'm still building the old Inno Setup installer
alongside this one, but I expect to retire it once the WiX one has
survived in the wild for a while and proven itself more or less
stable.
I've found both MSI and WiX to be confusing and difficult
technologies, so this installer has some noticeable pieces missing
(e.g. retrospective reconfiguration of the installed feature set, and
per-user vs systemwide installation) simply because I couldn't get
them to work. I've commented the new installer source code heavily, in
the hope that a passing WiX expert can give me a hand!
