RE: PATH & Perl 5.6 on Win32 ?

[Eric Brown]

It's definitely a bug in ActiveState Perl 5.6 (up to and including build
623).  If you want, I can send you a patch to the Perl sources that fixes
the problem.

I've sent a message to ActiveState, and it's in their bug system (#1342),
but in 4 months, it hasn't been assigned to a developer to fix.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Johan Holmberg [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 2:11 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: PATH & Perl 5.6 on Win32 ?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Has anyone got cons working with ActiveState 5.6 on
> Windows (NT/2000/...) ?
> 
> After diving into the source code of Perl and rebuilding it with
> debugging it seems to me that ActiveState Perl 5.6 *ignores* any
> changes to the PATH environment variable in a Perl script, when
> searching for the binary given in a call like:
> 
>     $ENV{PATH} = "...";        # ignored while searching for "cl"
>     system("cl /c foo.c");
> 
> Instead Perl uses the PATH that was current when the script started.
> (curiously enough, the process started ("cl.exe" in the example
> above), is given the right PATH as part of its environment ...)
> 
> The way I encountered this problem initially was:
> 
>   - I have Visual C++ 5 in my PATH normally (as set in
>     Settings->Control Panel->System->Environment)
> 
>   - I often want to use Visual C++ 6 when running cons,
>     so I set PATH explicitly in Cons.
> 
>   - as described above my setting of PATH in Cons has no effect
>     and Visual C++ 5 is executed instead 6. Not what I want ....
> 
> Until recently I have been using an older version of ActiveState
> Perl (build 522 based on 5.005). There things seem to work better.
> 
> But now that I have looked at the code (of 5.6), I begin to worry
> about if the old version also just "seems to work".
> 
> If my conclusions above are correct (I still hope someone can prove
> me wrong), I wonder what Cons should do about it.
> I think it is essential that one can "trust" Cons, and if Cons
> itself can't trust Perl in Win32, what should be done ???
> 
> The only possible solution I can imagine, is to accept that some
> Perl versions are "broken" and implement the PATH-searching
> explicitly in Cons itself.
> 
> Any comments ?
> 
> /johan holmberg
> 
> 
> 
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