Auto-update fails on Windows for a non-admin user (UAC issue)

[lembitk]

I'm using Poedit (Pro) on Win 7 x64, and work within a standard user account, i.e. my usual Win account doesn't have administrator privileges. As Poedit checks for updates on launch, it offers to download and install an update from time to time – which is obviously very convenient. It is somewhat annoying however, that the auto-update fails under a standard Win account because the installer does not show the UAC prompt for elevation, quite common among Win installers. In other words, the Win installer does not ask for the necessary, elevated privileges.

So I have to restart Poedit as an admin user ("Run as administrator") to update it, and then restart again to actually work with my translation projects.

This is not a serious issue, rather an annoyance, but a fix would sure improve the overall Poedit Windows experience – which is just great in general, thanks.

[vslavik]

There are three groups of people who install Poedit differently (in, in my experience, decreasing size):

1. Admin users, install globally (requires admin access).
2. Non-admin users who can't elevate (installed user-locally).
3. People with admin access who use another account for normal work, or multi-user machines.

This is a direct consequence of supporting group 2 in an easy-to-use way and it isn't limited to in-app updates, but occurs when you run the update's installer manually too. This situation can't be handled easily (if at all) with InnoSetup: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21556853/make-innosetup-installer-request-privileges-elevation-only-when-needed

It's probably something WinSparkle could handle reasonably, though (especially when used with vslavik/winsparkle#21)...

[lembitk]

Václav, thank you for a thorough answer. I can see how this could be tricky to implement (I checked this more generic Stack Overflow thread on topic yesterday, before opening the issue). And now I understand even better that the possible value gained (a bit more convenience for some users) might be rather low compared to the effort required. I think I can live with the auto-update process as is (as said, an annoyance, not a bug) :) I also guess that we, the users belonging to group 3, are less or more aware that by gaining a bit in security (hopefully), we lose a bit in convenience.

Thanks again for this insightful explanation, and – thanks for a great tool as Poedit is.

[vslavik]

by gaining a bit in security (hopefully),

IMHO there's precious little point on modern Windows and I would indeed be tempted to shrug it off. But it's the same for multi-user machines, so I think it should be fixed (and am leaving this issue open for that)...