On 27/07/2010 17:51, scott wrote:
> Sorry, but that's absolute rubbish.  There is a system in place to restrict 
> the installation of programs for many valid reasons, it's not up to software 
> writers to find devious and bizarre ways to bypass it (eg by installing into 

I really hope you're not implying that this is what we have done.

> My Documents!).  One obvious example is software licensing, if an 
> organisation needs to track the licenses of all installed software for 
> audits then POV is going to slip through the net and cause problems. 

POV-Ray is installed into the users profile folder. This is as far as I
could tell the best solution for a non-privileged user on Vista. And
insofar as suggesting the install could be missed, that is nonsense. When
POV is installed via a MSI, the software is registered with the Windows
Installer DB. This applies no matter where the EXE ends up on the hard disk.

> Another issue is when a user gets concerned when POV installs without asking 
> for Admin rights, they are not expecting that.

I see many programs that install without admin rights. In fact, the past
requirement for many programs that actually didn't *need* admin rights to
require them just to be installed is one major factor in the push by
Microsoft to move away from this requirement. They are quite clear in that
if a program doesn't need admin rights to run, it shouldn't need it to be
installed. It's up to the system admin to set policies about install, not
relying on admin or lack thereof.

> There might even be a legal issue somewhere with the POV license, if the 
> machine administrator has not given permission for it to be installed, 

If the machine admin doesn't want any software installed and hasn't locked
down installs completely, then he's got more to worry about than POV. We
use MSI-based installs rather than a setup.exe, meaning that anyone with
control over group policy can easily restrict exactly what Windows
installer does or doesn't allow. Programs that don't use windows installer
can bypass this. Put simply, if a user can put a EXE on the system, they
can install software, and it's not our problem to deal with this. We
provide the means for admins to audit installs by using Windows Installer,
and that's about the most we can do.

-- Chris

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