On 8/1/11 2:58 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
The NSIS script used to update the environment
variable (EnvVarUpdate) has the following warning [1]:
"Warning this code will replace paths rather than append if the existing
path exceeds the maximum string length in the NSIS build you are using.
Some setup crash can also occurs."
The default maximum string length is 1024. There is a special build of
NSIS [2] which has a larger maximum string length (8192) that would help
avoid this problem. There is also a patch [1] for EnvVarUpdate that
detects if the PATH will be overwritten instead of appended to and tells
the user to update their PATH manually.
I've seen this issue complained about before online but
hadn't experienced it myself until recently. It can be a rather
frustrating problem to experience as restoring your PATH isn't trivial
because there is no way (that I know of) to look at what your PATH was
before it was destroyed and the PATH is often updated by installers (as
it is with dmd).
[1]
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Environmental_Variables:_append,_prepend,_and_remove_entries#Warning
[2] http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Special_Builds
Regards,
Brad Anderson
Hi Brad,
IIRC I wrote the installer and I knew about the problem too because some
people started complaining about it but I didn't know of the solution
(maybe at that moment the solution was not known). So good you found it :-)
What we can do is to copy this patched EnvVarUpdate function to the
installer script and use it, I think it'll be much more safe than to
just hope the system that runs the nsis script has the patched function
or the special build.
What do you think? Could you make that change and do a pull request? (I
don't have a Windows machine near me anymore nor a VM).
