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

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 26 September 2015 at 02:30, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 16:06:44 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>>
>> I suppose, PATH variable on windows works the same as on unix? And path
>> hell can be easily reproduced on unix too. Nothing windows-specific here.
>
>
> AFAIK, PATH on Windows works basically the same as it does on *nix, but a
> big difference is that on *nix, there are generally some very specific
> places where programs go, and almost nothing needs to touch PATH - e.g. a
> binary is usually going to be in /bin, /usr/bin, or /usr/local/bin, all of
> which are likely to be in your PATH variable. And if you installed something
> as your user, then you'd generally put the binary (or a symlink to it) in
> ~/bin. Windows really doesn't have anything like bin. Everything gets
> installed in its own directory (usually under Program Files), and if you
> want it to be usable on the command line, you have to add it to PATH. And
> since all of these programs are separate, they can have executables with the
> same name (e.g. link.exe), whereas that's much less likely on *nix, because
> almost all executables get installed to one of a few bin directories. So,
> you won't even end up installing conflicting binaries, because they'd
> overwrite each other.
>
> I really don't know what the "correct" way to deal with this is in Windows,
> but the way that it's set up does seem to naturally cause more problems with
> PATH than you typically get in *nix.

I think the biggest problem with PATH in windows in general is that
windows doesn't have dependency management.
As a result, every time you ship a program in windows, you need to
bundle it together with every other program it depends on. This leads
to hundreds of instances of exactly the same thing littered all over
the place, and as soon as more than one of those places enters the
PATH environment, then you have potential conflicts, and ordering
issues.

Windows is just a terrible operating system and I wish it would die
already, but OSS just can't get a reasonable Microsoft Office,
Photoshop, or Visual Studio alternative together. I don't even care if
it's free, I'd pay good money for a linux version of each of these
programs, they just have to exist.