[INTERNAL] List of rufus-4.8 enhancements and fixes

[pbatard]

This topic is flagged as INTERNAL and is therefore NOT open for comments.

Medium Term

• Dark mode for rufus #2713
• We're going to have to take matters in our own hands when it comes to the buggy AMI NTFS driver and forcefully prevent the non UEFI:NTFS partition to boot when md5sum validation is applied...
• Windows installer corrupts the backup GPT of the installer drive?!? What the hell?!? → Seen when installing Win11 and shutting down the machine after the installer bails out on the 59fd550 issue
• Detecting the ISO build takes a long time due to having to mount the ISO and process the wim. We'd probably be better off hacking the ISO directly through libcdio and locating the XML data ourselves. Maybe look at what wimlib is doing?

Long Term No Rush

• Ultimately, we probably want to replace all mentions of ISO Mode with FST Mode...
• Do we have an issue unloading old UEFI:NTFS drivers (and have Google secretly been using our NTFS drivers in their Chromebooks)? → Needs more data... which we don't have!
• Add support for systemd-boot (if needed and whenever the hell we find an ISO that uses that). This'll probably mean looking for loader/entries/*.conf on the ESP and altering the labels.
• Add a .esp image copy mode?
• Is there any way we can make the regular MSVC exe behave the same as the App Store one? Even as it's the same executable binary, the App Store version is a lot less forgiving about exceptions and at any rate, you'd expect the standard MSVC binary to report stuff like access violations, especially when debugging in VS, yet it doesn't...
• The case of tails and its early write-error unless you zero the drive first... And now the case of Windows complaining that it needs a restart when you write a UEFI bootloader.
• Should we try to remove volume drive letter while saving to VHD just to be safe? We do lock the physical drive, but Windows being Windows, we may still have some bad surprises there...
• What on earth does one have to do to fix the device dropdown not displaying on startup issue?!? → Dammit, now this has moved to the Drive Properties label sometimes not being displayed
• Async/double buffering improvements for ISO mode
• Use VDS for GetDrivePartitionData() and use this opportunity to call on IVdsVolumeMF_GetFileSystemProperties() to get the file systems. Or we might switch to using WMI as Microsoft advises and create our own C++ wmi library interface. (Except WMI won't for Win7 users...)
• Also we should use VDS to query data for label sanitization
• Detect GPT that is smaller than disk size and ask user "Do you want to fix this?"
• Add support for .json provided custom commands to apply after the image has been created. e.g. something like:

{
  "commands": [
    {
      "image": "en_windows_7_ultimate_with_sp1_x86_dvd_619077.iso",
      "source_dir": "C:/my_dir/",
      "custom_var1": "SOME_VAR",
      "command": "my_command.exe some_flags %custom_var1% some_more_flags"
    }
  ]
}

• We don't detect Ubuntu ARM64 as Linux images where persistence can be enabled. We may want to change that.
• UI should be disabled during port cycle until we detect the cycled device again (with timeout in case the user yanked the device)
• Label changed by the user should not revert to ISO label once the drive has been created.