feat(nsis): transition UAC elevation to pure powershell + Start-Process + RunAs

[mmaietta]

This pull request introduces a new approach for UAC (User Account Control) elevation in the NSIS updater, transitioning from the legacy elevate.exe helper to using PowerShell as the primary method. The legacy elevate.exe is retained as a fallback for environments where PowerShell is unavailable. Additional changes improve error messages and the handling of the elevation helper.

• The NSIS updater now attempts to elevate privileges using PowerShell (Start-Process -Verb RunAs) as the primary method, falling back to elevate.exe if encountering ENOENT

[changeset-bot]

🦋 Changeset detected

Latest commit: 4d01916

The changes in this PR will be included in the next version bump.

This PR includes changesets to release 9 packages

Name	Type
electron-updater	Minor
app-builder-lib	Major
dmg-builder	Major
electron-builder-squirrel-windows	Major
electron-builder	Major
electron-forge-maker-appimage	Major
electron-forge-maker-nsis-web	Major
electron-forge-maker-nsis	Major
electron-forge-maker-snap	Major

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR updates the Windows NSIS updater’s UAC elevation strategy by making PowerShell-based elevation (Start-Process -Verb RunAs) the primary mechanism, while keeping the legacy elevate.exe approach as a fallback when PowerShell cannot be executed.

Changes:

• Switch NSIS install elevation from elevate.exe to powershell.exe -EncodedCommand (Start-Process ... -Verb RunAs) with ENOENT fallback to elevate.exe.
• Make packaging of elevate.exe more tolerant when it’s absent from the NSIS directory (skip copy rather than failing).
• Update installer failure log messaging to refer to “UAC elevation” (but still needs alignment with the actual Electron API used).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 5 comments.

File	Description
packages/electron-updater/src/NsisUpdater.ts	Implements PowerShell-based UAC elevation with fallback to elevate.exe and updates related logging.
packages/app-builder-lib/src/targets/nsis/nsisUtil.ts	Adjusts elevate.exe packaging to skip copying when the binary is not present.
.changeset/sad-ends-vanish.md	Declares minor version bumps for electron-updater and app-builder-lib reflecting the feature change.

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