PuTTY wish win-versioninfo

summary: Add VERSIONINFO resource to Windows binaries
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
fixed-in: 2005-10-05 (0.59) (0.60) (0.61) (0.62)

A number of people have asked us to include a VERSIONINFO resource in the Windows binaries we ship, declaring a version number.

Some people find it more convenient to look at the file properties to identify a binary than to run it.
Some remote auditing tools apparently pick up on this information.
Some people would like to create installers that depend on a particular version of a PuTTY utility.
It also affects Inno Setup's behaviour.

Such a version numbering scheme needs to take into account our daily snapshots, and thus to be updated in an automated way.

Update, 2005-10-05: after wrestling with various toolchains, we've finally checked in something that appears to work with the Windows compilers we've tried. We reserve the right to back it out if it causes trouble.

The meaning of the binary version number (e.g., 0.58.6356.0) is described in windows/version.rc2.

(The PuTTY binaries also contain XML application manifests to improve appearance on Windows XP; these contain a mandatory four-component version number. We don't attempt to keep this in sync with the VERSIONINFO resource. In current code this is hard-coded to 0.0.0.0, although in some older versions it was set to 1.0.0.0. This isn't ideal, although we don't currently know of anything that actually looks at this version number.)

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2008-02-10 14:42:39 +0000)