Install-NodeVersion 20 Fails

[drekuru]

Issue:
Running the following command Install-NodeVersion 20 fails with a path issue. Per the screenshot

it's looking for a nodejs dir which is no longer sitting in the .u directory but is nested inside of a new dir PFiles64.

Adding a check for this unpack should fix the problem

System: Windows 10
Environment: Windows Powershell, Powershell 7.3.4 (tested in both)

As a side note:
Powershell v6+ Supports chaining params in the Join-Path command like Join-Path "str1 "str2" "str3" and so on, (beyond 2 params).
However this syntax doesn't work with windows powershell

[aaronpowell]

There must be something different in the MSI structure, or how the MSI unpacks. I wonder if this is only in Node.js v20 and above or a change in Windows MSI handling.

I'll look at getting to this at some point, but it's a low priority for me at present as I'm not really using the module myself these days, I primarily use WSL for development, so happy for someone to take a crack and I can review the changes.

[drekuru]

@aaronpowell
For me it was just erroring out for Node 20.
Installing Node 18 and 16 was no problem.

I am down to take a crack at it, to pretty much add a path check to see if nodejs is there otherwise try to look for a PFiles64 dir, however I am not sure how this will affect, non-Windows installations, not sure if any of your tests account for this, nor do I have a way of manually testing against Mac and/or Linux.

If you don't see any issues with this approach, I will gladly make a PR.

[aaronpowell]

Check for existence of the folder and append it probably is the simplest then. We have test coverage that runs on Mac and Linux so assuming they all pass still it should be fine

[aaronpowell]

I've done some digging into the root cause of the issue and why it's only just cropped up.

In Node.js 19 there was a refactor to how the MSI is built on Windows, and this saw a migration from Wix 3.x to Wix 4.x, which happened in nodejs/node#45943 (relevant changelog: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/changelogs/CHANGELOG_V19.md#other-notable-changes).

I'm not familiar with how Wix works or how the MSI is created, but likely something was changed to better handle the support for Program Files paths across 32bit and 64bit architectures, and that sees the bundling into a subfolder.

I confirmed this by using https://github.com/activescott/lessmsi to have a look into MSI packages from v18, v19 and v20 and you can see the folder path change in the internals. It can also be observed that 32bit and 64bit have some slightly different paths, as they target different Program Files locations:

As a fix, we should check for the existence of the PFiles folder with the architecture suffix (blank for 32bit, 64 for 64bit) so that we can unpack appropriately.

There might be a better way to unpack with MSI command line flags, but this work in #102 should do as an initial solution.