[Ifeffit] Launching Problem (D)Athena and Co.

[Bruce Ravel]

Hi Alfred,

I am thrilled that you discovered the problem, because I was stumped!

Actually, you have uncovered a problem I have been worrying about for
some time.  I have been procrastinating on addressing the problem
because such a small fraction of Windows users will ever see the
problem.

As you have found, Demeter coexists poorly with other versions of perl
installed on the computer.  A partial list of software which will
trigger this conflict includes:

   ActivePerl
   CitrusPerl / Cava package manager
   Git for Windows
   MinGW (possibly -- one can install MinGW and not install perl)
   Cygwin

There are probably other, but that's the list of things I know of
which will install a version of perl that cannot be guaranteed to work
well with Demeter.

There are at least two work-arounds:

 1. The one you found is to edit your PATH so that C:\strawberry comes
    before all the other possible locations of perl version.  The
    problem with this is that doing so might break other software you
    have your system that is expecting to use a particular perl
    installation. 

 2. If you are actually using perl on your windows computer, you can
    download the Demeter source code and install Demeter following the
    linux installation instructions.  You will need a proper
    development environment so that Ifeffit and various other
    dependencies can be built and installed.  Citrus, MinGW, and
    Cygwin can all, in principle, provide this level of support.

    Obviously, this can be done.  I had to do all of this in order to
    build the Demeter installer.  I know of at least one user of my
    software who opted to work this way.

If you or anyone else has any substantive suggestions for how best to
deal with this sort of conflict, I am very eager for good suggestions.

If anyone would like to help me package Demeter more effectively on
Windows -- that would make me deliriously happy.

Thanks,
B


On Wednesday, August 22, 2012 04:23:46 PM Alfred Hummer wrote:
> Ok,
> 
> I found the problem.
> There was a version of MinGW installed on the computer.
> I just placed the MinGW PATH variables after the strawberry ones, and it
> worked.
> 
> So it was a special conflict between software packages on my PC.
> 
> best, Alfred
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-- 

 Bruce Ravel  ------------------------------------ bravel at bnl.gov

 National Institute of Standards and Technology
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