Discord.Discord installer type

[AdreKiseque]

I notice the manifest for Discord's installer specifies having interactive and silent installer modes, but it doesn't have any explicit switches defined on how they're used. How does WinGet know how to call the installer without this information?

[SpecterShell]

There used to be a silent switch --silent, which could suppress any interactive windows showing up, but also skip the Discord's initialization process (technically the version database generation triggered by --squirrel-firstrun during installation), which breaks Discord and thus removed in #77956. Since there is no better solution, the switch fields are left empty and WinGet will simply run the installer without any parameters.

[AdreKiseque]

Hm... interesting. So the installer has a native switch that just, breaks it? How bizarre.

[SpecterShell]

Hm... interesting. So the installer has a native switch that just, breaks it? How bizarre.

Technically, Discord installer is based on Squirrel. During normal installation, Squirrel runs Discord with an addtional switch --squirrel-install, and Discord makes use of such mechanism to do some initialization works and then exits. After normal installation, Squirrel runs Discord again with --squirrel-firstrun. Compard with normal startup, Discord would moves the installer.db file in the version-specfic app directory to the parent directory.

However, Squirrel skips the --squirrel-firstrun part in silent installation.

[AdreKiseque]

So I take that, before the switch for Discord was broken, it only skipped --squirrel-firstrun when run with --silent but still ran --squirrel--install?

[SpecterShell]

So I take that, before the switch for Discord was broken, it only skipped --squirrel-firstrun when run with --silent but still ran --squirrel--install?

Both. Silent installation skips both the initizaition process during installation (--squirrel-install) and running the program after the installation is completed (--squirrel-firstrun).

[AdreKiseque]

Hm? But Discord used to work with the --silent switch, didn't it? Did it not use to need the squirrel switches or something?

[SpecterShell]

Hm? But Discord used to work with the --silent switch, didn't it? Did it not use to need the squirrel switches or something?

Sorry. I just rechecked the codes and it appears that I was wrong. The initization procedure is still invoked during silent installation, but it only does the following:

1. Create shortcuts
2. Set up autostart
3. Set up protocols
4. Exit

And with --squirrel-firstrun Discord also moves the installer.db file in the app directory to the parent directory during startup.