[tex-live] vista UAC testing

[Siep Kroonenberg]

Earlier, I mailed that under Vista I couldn't run an unsigned
executable without administrator privileges.

Now I figured out that was because the executable was an installer.
Vista somehow identified the program as such and concluded that it
needed administrator privileges, which was not the case. For NSIS
installers you can now add a `manifest' specifying whether
administrator privileges are required, optional or irrelevant.

The latest MinGW also has manifest support, but I haven't tested this.

I also could run the Perl widget demo from my mingw-compiled Perl as
a regular user. Apparently, Vista assumed that it didn't require
administrator privileges. Hopefully, the same will be true for a
Perl/Tk installer.

I had to click through Vista UAC warnings before running these
programs, because they lacked a digital signature. Microsoft has
free command-line tools to attach a digital signature to existing
executables, given a standard non-Microsoft certificate. I tested
the code signing procedure with a test certificate which I had
generated with other free Microsoft command-line tools.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg