Embed Version Information in Windows Binary

[bloudraak]

System

• Version: 0.19.1
• Platform: Windows (both 64bit + 32bit)
• Firefox: N/A
• Selenium: N/A

Testcase

• Download the binary from GitHub Releases.
• Extract the archive
• Navigate to the binary
• Right Click on the binary, select Properties and look at the Details tab

The expectation is that it will contain the current version of the binary, which is 0.19.1.

Stacktrace

N/A

Trace-level log

N/A

Rationale

It seems that every web driver has its own custom way of displaying version information and that could change anytime, thus complicating tasks as simple as determining which version of which binary was deployed.

If the version information is embedded in the executable, it allows for the following scenarios:

• support for asset management systems
• support for automation through the GetFileVersionInfo Windows API (or a binding that supports it)
• support for packaging systems that can use the version in the binary to determine whether the binary should be deployed or not.

More information: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms646981(v=vs.85).aspx

[whimboo]

I actually do not have an idea if Rust/Cargo supports that yet. Searching a bit I only found https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2273.

@hoodie do you know something?

[bloudraak]

There are a couple of folks that do something similiar:

This seems to invoke the resource compiler on Windows, but makes it a NOP on other platforms. https://github.com/nabijaczleweli/cargo-update/blob/380bb1064090720c90a87254f1870a07fce1b72c/build.rs

And there is also https://github.com/nabijaczleweli/rust-embed-resource

I have not tried them myself (and never did anything useful in rust)