daisy/pipeline-assembly

NSIS Installer fails to write to Windows Registry

Closed this issue · 5 comments

mccallum-sgd commented

Discovered this issue with an error when running pipeline-updater-gui.exe from Windows 10, 64-bit:

Exception in Application start method
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException...
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Couldn't find the pipeline home in the registry
        at org.daisy.pipeline.updater.gui.Main.start(Main.java:37)

[full log: pipeline-assembly.136log.txt]

The installer attempts to write the following entries to the registry with WriteRegStr (https://github.com/daisy/pipeline-assembly/blob/master/src/main/nsis/installer.nsi#L272):

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\DAISY Consortium\DAISY Pipeline 2
HKLM\SOFTWARE\DAISY Pipeline 2\InstallDir
HKLM\SOFTWARE\DAISY Pipeline 2\Pipeline2Home

After installing DAISY Pipeline 2 with the latest assembly release, none of these entries were written to my registry (I searched and manually browsed my registry for them).

@bertfrees thinks it may have to do with registry differences between 32-bit and 64-bit, referencing this NSIS Forum post reporting a simliar problem: https://nsis-dev.github.io/NSIS-Forums/html/t-319451.html

bertfrees commented

@mccallum-sgd Did you also check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WOW6432node? Romain thinks maybe the installer writes to the registry correctly, but the updater fails to read from it.

mccallum-sgd commented

@bertfrees Oh yes just checked WOW6432Node, all of the entries are there (InstallDir, NSIS:Language, Pipeline2Home, StartMenuGroup). That's weird that this didn't show up when I searched my registry for it.

bertfrees commented

OK. That explains things. It seems the updater code doesn't handle this case.

bertfrees commented

One possibility would have been to write into the 64-bit registry using SetRegView, but since the installer can not really know which version of Java (32 or 64 bit) will be used to run the program, I thought it would be better to assume 32-bit, and to add some code to pipeline-updater-gui to handle the 64-bit case.

Sean implemented this in daisy/pipeline-updater-gui#4.

rdeltour commented

I think we can close this one, right @bertfrees ?