Sentry error reports showcase that elevation errors on Windows are one
of the most frequent Windows errors.
In order to perform Windows elevation, we ship compiled EXEs of a third
party CLI elevation application (http://code.kliu.org/misc/elevate/)
that has several limitations:
- We have the scan the output of the script to determine if a user
cancelled the elevation request, which causes all sorts of issues on
computers where English is not the main language
- The application displays a `cmd.exe` window for some milliseconds,
which is bad UX, that we have to workaround by distributing a patched
version of the tool
- The CLI application has to be spawned, which seems to be problematic
if users have anti-virus software, leading to hard to debug issues
- We don't have any control if something goes wrong
For these reasons, we decided to implement our own elevation mechanism
in C++ as a Node.js add-on, based on the `elevate.exe` code we where
previously using.
Misc changes:
- Introduce a `lib/shared/bindings.js` module to easily require local native
add-ons
- Install `cpplint` and configure it to lint C++ files
Note that for practical reasons, the C++ code lives in this repository
rather than in a separate module. We will release this functionality in
a more accessible way in the future as part of the Etcher SDK project.
Change-Type: patch
Changelog-Entry: Fix uncaught errors when cancelling elevation requests on Windows when the system's language is not English.
Signed-off-by: Juan Cruz Viotti <jviotti@openmailbox.org>
