#1302 Should 8192 string limit build be the default nowadays?

[Jack Jansen]

This is a request to make the 8192-character-string-length build the default.

I am using NSIS in various projects, and over the last few years I'm getting increasingly many reports that my installers fail.

I have finally gotten access to a machine where this happened, and googling the error message led me to many reports in many software packages that were also suffering from this problem: if the end user has a PATH of more than 1024 characters an NSIS-installer cannot add to PATH.

I found the 8192-limit NSIS build, and that seems to fix the problem, if I manually install NSIS, then unzip the special build, then manually build my installer..

But for production this is an issue, because (for example) the github Actions CI/CD Windows machines have the 1024-limit builds installed.

So this is a plea to make the 8192 build the default.

[Anders]

8192 is still less than the path limit.

Use https://nsis.sourceforge.io/EnVar_plug-in

[Jack Jansen]

@Anders unfortunately that doesn't solve the workflow issue: my NSIS installers are created by cmake/cpack, so cpack would have to be thought about this plugin. I did find a rather gross workaround for github actions: you can overwrite the pre-installed NSIS.

        - name: Install NSIS 8192-character limit override
          shell: pwsh
          run: |
                $thirdpartydir="$((Get-Item ..\3rdparty).FullName)"
                $zipfile="$thirdpartydir\nsis-8192-overrides.zip"
                (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile(
                "https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/nsis/NSIS%203/3.09/nsis-3.09-strlen_8192.zip",$zipfile);
                Write-Output "NSIS-8192-override: installing..."
                Expand-Archive -Path $zipfile -DestinationPath "C:\Program Files (x86)\NSIS\" -Force

But you have to make a mental note for yourself that whenever github changes the pre-installed NSIS you have to update this stanza with the new corresponding zipfile.

[Jason]

What's wrong with fetching my plugin off the wiki? As far as I know, the link never changes between updates.

The other option is to include the plugin in NSIS itself, but the issue hasn't popped up enough to justify adding it (plus it's not my choice anyway).