As mentioned in my previous post, I have been working on incorporating some more features into WinVer.nsh. Every little change in this header file requires testing on all possible versions and configurations of Windows. Being the Poor Open Source Developer^TM that I am, I do not have sufficient resources to assemble a full-blown testing farm with every possible version of Windows on every possible hardware configuration. Instead, I have to settle for a bunch of virtual machines I have collected over the years. It is pretty decent, but has no standards and doesn’t cover every possible version. Still, it does its job well and has proven itself very effective.

Obviously, be it a farm or a mere collection of virtual machines, testing on so many different configurations carries with it a hefty fine. Testing a single line change could waste almost an hour. Imagine the time it would take to test, fix, retest, fix and retest again a complete rewrite of WinVer.nsh. As fascinating as that empirical scientific experiment would have been, I was reluctant to find out. Laziness, in this case, proved to be a very practical solution.

WinVer.nsh tests do not really need the entire operation system and its behavior as it relies on nothing but 4 parameters. All it requires is the return values of GetVersionEx for OSVERSIONINFO and OSVERSIONINFOEX. For nothing more than 312 bytes, I have to wait until Windows Vista decides it wants to execute my test, Windows NT4 gracefuly connects to my network, Windows ME wakes up on the right side of the bed and doesn’t crash, Windows Server 2008 installs again after its license has expired and Windows 95…. Actually, that one works pretty well. So why wait?

Instead, I’ve created a little harvester that collects those 312 bytes, ran it on all of my machines and mustered the results into one huge script that tests every aspect of WinVer.nsh using every possible configuration of Windows in a few seconds. It required adding a hooking option to WinVer.nsh, but with the new !ifmacrondef, that was easy enough.

Currently, the script tests:

• Windows 95 OSR B
• Windows 98
• Windows ME
• Windows NT4 (SP1, SP6)
• Windows 2000 (SP0, SP4)
• Windows XP (SP2, SP3)
• Windows XP x64 (SP1)
• Windows Vista (SP0)
• Windows Server 2008 (SP1)

If you have access to a configuration not listed here, please run the harvester and send me the results. More specifically, I could really use Windows 2003 and Windows Vista SP1. My Windows Vista installation simply refuses the upgrade to SP1. Again.

The test script also includes a hexdump of those 312 bytes for every configuration so anyone performing similar tests for another reason doesn’t have to parse the NSIS syntax. Feel free to use it for your testing.