Pathing in the D ecosystem is generally broken (at least on windows)

[Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 17:48:50 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 16:43:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> I use the installer just so I don't have to configure the VS 
>> paths, but I tell it not to modify the PATH variable.
>
> Wow, if it has that option, that's cool.

It has for many releases now. There seems to be some out of date 
information people have about what the installer does. Here's 
some of the changes me and others have made over the years.

- Setting the PATH is optional.
- The installer detects and sets the paths to all the necessary 
Visual C++ stuff in sc.ini.
- The installer provides two shortcuts to command prompts 
configured with DMD and the necessary Visual Studio paths set up, 
one for a 32-bit environment and one for a 64-bit environment 
(just like Visual C++ does). I added this just for people who 
don't like having their PATH changed but still wanted something 
that worked out of the box.
- It no longer downloads the zip file and unpacks it, unix stuff 
and all, into the installation directory. Only the windows 
specific portion is included and it is embedded inside the 
installer.
- If it can't detect Visual C++ it offers to download the latest 
Community Edition for you.
- It can download and install Visual D.
- It warns before uninstalling your old version (in case you've 
customized your DMD in some way).
- OMF format libcurl is included now.
- It won't nuke the PATH environment variable due to a bug that 
was in NSIS (this was my first contribution to D years ago).