# Activation, installers and knowing which program we launched

> Small recovery fixes followed by more careful Windows software analysis.

Canonical page: https://pyrosoft.pro/blog/activation-installers-and-knowing-which-program-we-launched

Live development journal; no publication date.
Work period: 2026-10-02 to 2026-10-08
Updated: 2026-10-20

Sometimes the right update is a small one. Bourbon 26.10.2.5 fixed itch.io sign-in for people activating after a purchase, signing back in or setting up another Mac. Existing activated copies kept working. There was no reason to rebuild bottles or reinstall games to recover a purchase check.

The October 8 work then expanded the focus to Windows programs and installers. Opening an installer on a fresh setup prepared the core Wine runtime first. When an installation produced several similarly named programs, Bourbon preferred a unique exact match and asked for a selection when the result was ambiguous. If you explicitly chose a utility, that choice stayed yours.

That's the kind of detail that makes a launcher feel predictable. Picking a companion updater when you asked for the main application isn't helpful, even if both files technically run. The same update included a specific DPI correction for the verified PuTTY 0.84 x64 build, with explicit user overrides preserved.

Process tracking also became more precise. Launches retained records tied to their bottle and executable, Stop coordinated with the observer, and retries waited for the previous process to exit. A selected graphics backend alone stopped being enough reason to blame that backend for an unknown failure.

This is also where the current private development history has an import boundary. The October 8 import captured the existing Bourbon source; it wasn't the day all of those earlier features were first written. The older release notes supply that part of the timeline.

The practical result was a more careful handoff from analysis to execution. Detecting requirements could help choose a setup, while actual program windows and behavior still decided whether that setup worked.