beeware / beeware/briefcase

Replace the use of RCEdit in Windows builds

Open
#2,799 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
3.3k
Forks
549
Avg merge
1d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
40

Description

### What is the problem or limitation you are having?

On April 7, the [rcedit repository was put in to maintenance mode](https://github.com/electron/rcedit). This means the tool is no longer being maintained.

Electron has [moved](https://github.com/electron/packager/pull/1696) to using [resedit](https://www.npmjs.com/package/resedit), which is a pure Javascript tool.

### Describe the solution you'd like

We need a replacement for RCEdit that is actively maintained.

### Describe alternatives you've considered

We currently use RCedit to re-write application name, version, and icons in the stub Windows executable.

We could:
* Fork rcedit and maintain it ourselves.
* Use resedit (although this would require introducing Node into our build tools)
* Find a Python analog of resedit
* Write a Python analog of resedit

### Additional context

This isn't *urgent*, but it's clearly suboptimal to be dependent on am un-maintained tool.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading the current Windows build integration that invokes RCEdit and compare the proposed resedit and Python alternatives described in the issue. Done means replacing the unmaintained dependency while preserving rewriting the stub executable's application name, version, and icons.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, python
Domain
build-system, desktop-dev
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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