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  1. Picard
  2. PICARD-11

Solve UAC problems with running Picard from installer

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    • Icon: Improvement Improvement
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • Icon: Normal Normal
    • 1.1
    • 0.15.1
    • Packaging & Deployment
    • None
    • Windows Vista, Windows 7

      Users often have problems with drag & drop after clicking "Run Picard" from the Windows installer. This is because the installer runs with admin privileges and thus Picard will then run with admin privileges, which intentionally breaks drag & drop due to UAC.

      Even worse, I've seen anecdotal reports that sometimes if the user then uses Picard to rename/move files, it can end up creating files with only admin privileges and the user does not have write access from their regular user account without taking ownership of the files and mucking around with Windows privileges. This is not something most users want to do

      One option to address this appears to be using the NSIS UAC plugin from http://nsis.sourceforge.net/UAC_plug-in which the installer runs two processes; one with user-level privileges as a wrapper (and for launching), and another with privileged escalation.

      Some investigation would be required to see if this is a worthy trade-off and whether it affects things negatively for Windows XP installation.

          [PICARD-11] Solve UAC problems with running Picard from installer

          Lukáš Lalinský added a comment -

          https://github.com/musicbrainz/picard/commit/97dee3d6e00aae1a7054b2129e69b3242d214dc9

          Lukáš Lalinský added a comment - https://github.com/musicbrainz/picard/commit/97dee3d6e00aae1a7054b2129e69b3242d214dc9

          Cerdd Eightythree added a comment -

          I'd go along with ditching the checkbox also. Vista and 7 (the two OS's that use UAC) both highlight newly installed programs on the Start Menu, so it should be easy enough for a user to run the program the first time.

          Cerdd Eightythree added a comment - I'd go along with ditching the checkbox also. Vista and 7 (the two OS's that use UAC) both highlight newly installed programs on the Start Menu, so it should be easy enough for a user to run the program the first time.

          Michael Wiencek added a comment -

          From what I know many installers do, but it's only a very small convenience, so IMO not worth the effort required to fix. (Not that I know anything about windows dev.)

          Michael Wiencek added a comment - From what I know many installers do, but it's only a very small convenience, so IMO not worth the effort required to fix. (Not that I know anything about windows dev.)

          Lukáš Lalinský added a comment -

          Isn't simply removing the checkbox from the installer the best option? I don't use Windows regularly, but do installers still typically provide such a checkbox?

          Lukáš Lalinský added a comment - Isn't simply removing the checkbox from the installer the best option? I don't use Windows regularly, but do installers still typically provide such a checkbox?

          voiceinsideyou added a comment -

          Example of someone who has come across problems, presumably after tagging as Administrator from installer: http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=2973

          voiceinsideyou added a comment - Example of someone who has come across problems, presumably after tagging as Administrator from installer: http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=2973

          voiceinsideyou added a comment -

          Didn't see this prior to creating this, but essentially moved from http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/5473

          voiceinsideyou added a comment - Didn't see this prior to creating this, but essentially moved from http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/5473

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              Created:
              Updated:
              Resolved:

                Version Package
                1.1