[notifications]: Plugin causes crash on Windows 7

[dmitov]

As Windows 7 is still used in large organisations, despite being EOL since Jan 2023. Our app is occasionally ran on such systems and it works good when the notifications plugin is not installed.

It's not a critical feature to have the notifications on neither Windows 7, nor versions after, but still - we're willing to put time into this.

The issue is that notify-rust crate uses winrt-notification, which at some point was forked by @lucasfernog (kudos for doing it, btw!) as of this issue: hoodie/notify-rust#148 and PR: hoodie/notify-rust#149

I'm submitting the issue on the Tauri plugins workspace, because it actually affects Tauri users and the documentation on the website is misleading:
https://v2.tauri.app/distribute/windows-installer/#supporting-windows-7

When enabling the plugin (with or without the "windows7-compat" feature), the app crashes on Windows 7 before launching with the error explained in tauri-apps/tauri#727

I suppose the app can't even be built on Windows 7 due to the dependencies winrt-notification is using, namely:
https://github.com/tauri-apps/winrt-notification/blob/dev/src/lib.rs#L34C1-L41C3

So question is - what should be the angle to attack this? And is the issue caused by winrt-notification or up/downstream?

As I said - we're willing to put the work for doing the hard work - we need guidance which is the way to approach it.

Kudos everyone from the Tauri team - as always - you've built something amazing! Keep it up!

[amrbashir]

@dmitov apologies for the late response, it seems like the crashes is probably due to winrt-notification because it links to some win32 APIs at compile time that are not found in Windows 7.

There is two ways this can be fixed IMO:

• Move winrt-notification behind a cargo feature flag (that is enabled by default to avoid breaking change), and so you can disable this feature flag and build a specific version of your app for windows 7.
• Change winrt-notification to link the needed methods at runtime instead of at compile, this is quite hard and annoying, given that the types and functions used from windows crate is a bit complex and will require us to write their vtables (see https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/blob/master/src/platform_impl/windows/definitions.rs for an example, it is horrifying)

I am more in favor of the first approach tbh.

[FabianLars]

I am more in favor of the first approach tbh.

Same, also better for the future when we drop win7 support.