[Ifeffit] Demeter won't start in Windows 7

Matt Newville newville at cars.uchicago.edu
Sun Jul 12 17:29:17 CDT 2015


Hi Bruce,


On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Bruce Ravel <bravel at bnl.gov> wrote:

>
> I'll add that something seems kind of broken on your computer:
>
> PATH:
>         t Shared\Windows
> Live;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program
> Files\Intel\WiFi\bin\;C:\Program Files\Common
> Files\Intel\WirelessCommon\;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows
> Live\Shared;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio
> Shared\DLLShared\;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio
> Shared\OEM\DLLShared\;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio
> Shared\OEM\DLLShared\;C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Roxio
> Shared\OEM\12.0\DLLShared\;C:\Program Files
> (x86)\Roxio\OEM\AudioCore\;C:\strawberry\c\bin\gnuplot\bin;C:\Python27;C:\Python27\DLLs;C:\Python27\Scripts;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\vtk;C:\Python27\gnuplot\binary;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\osgeo;C:\Program
> Files (x86)\pythonxy\SciTE-3.3.2-3;C:\Program Files
> (x86)\pythonxy\console;C:\Program Files (x86)\pythonxy\swig;C:\Program
> Files (x86)\pythonxy\gettext\bin;C:\Program Files
> (x86)\Skype\Phone\;C:\MinGW32-xy\bin
>
>
> Broken thing #1: The first item in the path is "t Shared\Windows Live"
> which is not a valid path.
>
> Broken thing #2: Demeter's installer puts three things in your path, all
> of which start with "C:\strawberry".  None of them are in your path
> variable.
>
> I don't know how you got to this place and I don't know the best way to
> fix it, but it is certainly a situation that Demeter is not prepared for.
> Unless you explicitly fix something like how Matt suggested, there is a 0%
> chance that anything else you try will get Demeter working on your computer.
>
> I'd also like to point out that Demeter works just fine on Windows 7.  I
> test every installer on Windows 7 machines.  The problem here is that
> Demeter won't starting on *your* computer.
>
>
Well, in fairness to William, he's not alone in having similar problems
running Athena on Windows.   It might be worthwhile having the batch files
set PATH explicitly, rather than relying on a correctly managed PATH
variable.  Windows just does not expect (nor make it easy) for users to set
the PATH -- just finding where to set this is a deep dive into the Control
Panel, and the interface stinks.

I'm definitely no expert in Windows batch files, but I believe magic
variables %~dp0 and %~dpnx0 apparently point to the batch file being
executed and its directory.  That might be useful to set the PATH based on
where ever the batch file is located.   I don't quite understand where or
how the batch files are created from the demeter source tree, and am away
from a Windows computer myself to test this, but it would probably be
pretty easy to make a batch file solution work.

Another alternative might be to make all batch files just run a "wrapper"
perl program that sets the environment variables and runs the right
program.  That could be more sophisticated, perhaps automatically checking
for updates, sort of like the older ifeffit "runner.exe" did.

--Matt
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