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

[Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 09:03:35 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 00:25:54 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> I update DMD yesterday, it couldn't work out where it was 
>> installed and the uninstall fails, then complains and errors 
>> when trying to install over the failed uninstall, requiring 
>> manual intervention.
>>
>> [...]
>
> There seems to be a trend here:
> Windows devs have problems getting D to install/work correctly 
> on their machines.
> Non-windows devs boot up windows and test it and it works fine 
> for them (In this case that was me).

Thousands of developers download and use the installer just fine. 
Right after Walter added 64-bit support it was a chore for each 
developer to get it working but it's designed to Just Work these 
days (Martin even recently made it offer to download Visual 
Studio and install it for you). I don't think this is a 
Windows-dev vs non-Windows-dev issue, it's an atypical setup 
issue. There is also a history of the installer not being very 
good years ago so some of the veteran D users have an 
understandable bias against it.

> I seriously doubt that much progress will be made here unless 
> some dedicated full-time modern Windows developers take over or 
> at least significantly help with the installer code. Someone 
> like you has years of experience and knowledge about what are 
> good/bad solutions on windows, what workarounds/hacks are OK 
> and which will be abhorrent to users, what will likely break in 
> newer versions of windows/VS etc. etc. etc.
>
> Realistically, no-one except an experienced full-time windows 
> developer is ever going to get this right.

That's kind of what happened. I started using D and the installer 
sucked. I'm no NSIS ninja but I do use NSIS for our commercial 
product at work so I was somewhat familiar with it and slowly 
made improvements to it. Rainer, Martin, and Vladimir all 
contributed things too. Personally I think it's in great shape 
these days. I can't think of a single thing I'd change about it. 
It's simple and svelte but does everything it needs to (and 
doesn't take 10 minutes to install). The only thing that I'd like 
to see is Code Signing of the installer and the 
executables/binaries included but that requires someone higher up 
on the foodchain than me to do (perhaps we can finally get it 
when the D Foundation is in place).