Ensure that the encoding of the win_updates scripts is not corrupted.

[matthew-s-walker]

SUMMARY

We run Windows updates on some machines with more "unusual" encodings such as Chinese machines.
At some point between Ansible 7.5.0 and 8.3.0, we started encountering encoding related issues (see below).

This change base64 encode/decodes the update script wrapper and contents to prevent this.

ISSUE TYPE

• Bugfix Pull Request

COMPONENT NAME

win_updates

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Example error on a Chinese machine:

FAILED - RETRYING: [win2019_x64_std_zh_tw]: Check for updates (3 retries left).Result was: {
    "attempts": 1,
    "changed": false,
    "failed_update_count": 0,
    "filtered_updates": {},
    "found_update_count": 0,
    "installed_update_count": 0,
    "invocation": {
        "module_args": {
            "accept_list": null,
            "category_names": [
                ...
            ],
            "log_path": "c:\\windows_updates_pre.txt",
            "reboot": false,
            "reboot_timeout": 1200,
            "reject_list": [
		...
            ],
            "server_selection": "windows_update",
            "skip_optional": false,
            "state": "searched"
        }
    },
    "msg": "Unknown failure running win_updates bootstrap process:  H \"1\"  ޼ƩI s \"Deserialize\"  ɵo ͨҥ~   p: \"'Element'  O L Ī  XmlNodeType C\"",
    "retries": 4,
    "updates": {}
}

[jborean93]

Sorry I missed this PR. The change looks good but are you able to;

• Change the encoding from Unicode to UTF8 as it'll mean less data being written
• Add a changelog fragment documenting this bugfix https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/community/development_process.html#creating-changelog-fragments

[matthew-s-walker]

@jborean93 Sure, hope this looks OK. I'm afraid I don't have time at the moment to do a full test with those changes, but the lines work as expected in powershell for me.

[jborean93]

Closed and re-opened to trigger AZP which didn't seem to run on the last push.

[jborean93]

Thanks for submitting this fix!