Ticket #2011 (closed feature: moved)

Right now, Fiji and ImageJ2 have the problem that if unpacked into the Program Files directory on Windows, the ImageJ Updater does not have full, unimpeded read/write access to its own directory. This is due to the Windows security model. It is in general very difficult to detect programmatically whether things will work; they might seem to work temporarily until the computer is rebooted, for example.

However, there is a potential solution: distribute the Windows version of ImageJ using an installer such as NSIS or Inno Setup, and have the installer flag the entire ImageJ/Fiji directory as globally writable by all users.

For details, see  this SO answer and  this Inno Setup FAQ entry.

Having a Windows installer will be good anyway because Windows users are most comfortable with them (just like OS X users are comfortable with DMG images which they mount and then copy the .app into /Applications themselves).

One wrinkle is that we still want to give a helpful error message if ImageJ/Fiji was manually unpacked into Program Files without using the installer. To do that, we can have the installer write a stub file into the installation directory, which is not present in the ImageJ/Fiji cross-platform zip distribution. And if the Updater does not see that stub file, it refuses to try to update an installation in Program Files.