Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> Hi Patrick, all--
>
> On Sun 2026-08-09 12:48:54 +0200, Patrick Brunschwig wrote:
>
>> One of the missing pieces for FreePG in my eyes is a windows port. I
>> recently took the time to create a windows installer (cross-compiled on
>> Debian).
>
> Thank you for doing this work!
>
>> The result is available here (currently, a 1st release of 2.4.9):
>> https://enigmail.net/download/freepg-win/
>
> It looks like these are .exe installers
yes

> I'm pretty fuzzy on Windows these days, but a bit of digging turns up a
> suggestion that there are currently four styles of windows installers:
> MSIX, PWA, MSI, and EXE.  Just out of curiosity i thought i'd walk
> through what the tradeoffs are between them.
>
>  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publish-your-app/msix/reserve-your-apps-name
>
> MSIX appears to provide some sort of filesystem and registry isolation:
>
>   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/msix-containerization-overview?source=recommendations
>
> Given that freepg's main job is to do things like interact with the
> user's filesystem, maybe we don't want MSIX.  (though
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_apps#Security
> suggests that the limits might only be to "user folders" which is maybe
> sufficient?)
>
> I think PWA is a "progressive web app", which is definitely not FreePG.
>
> So, sticking with EXE or plain old MSI is probably what we want.  I
> think MSIs are likely to be better for uninstalling safely, though, no?
> Is it possible to build as an MSI?

My first goal was to get _something_ running on Windows, and using nsis
was just the simplest way ;-). But actually NSIS scripts are terrible,
so I definitely plan to look into creating an MSI installer.

>> If you're interested, the source code to build all pieces and create the
>> installer is in the following repository:
>> https://gitlab.com/pbrunschwig/freepg-win
>
> If other folks within FreePG are OK with it, would you be willing to
> move these build scripts under the FreePG umbrella officially?  If
> FreePG does adopt them, not sure whether we should put it in the main
> repo someplace, or just have it be its own repo, though.

Sure, I'd be very happy to move these scripts over to FreePG :-)

> We don't currently distribute even tarballs from the freepg.org; but
> maybe it's time to have another conversation about what artifacts we
> want to distribute?

That's probably a good idea.

-Patrick