[publican-list] Win32 Installer Woes

[Jeremy Cowgar]

Hello,

Publican was recommended to me in the #docbook IRC channel today, so I 
gave it a try. I was having Internet connectivity issues this morning 
and during the installation, when it went to download the DTD.zip file, 
the installer reported that the connection timed out the quit. I simply 
waiting until later in the day once my connectivity issues were fixed.

When I went to run the installer again, it said it was installed already 
and that it would have to be removed. That worked fine. The installation 
this time around went fine.

Now, I began using it and all worked fine. I then went to generate a PDF 
file using publican and got an error that "cmd.exe" couldn't be 
launched, so the PDF creation failed. I wasn't quite sure what that 
problem could have been, so I went on to other things. As I was working 
in the console I realized that a lot of my programs were not working, 
SVN, Fossil, Gcc, all MinGW utilities, Ant, etc... All of them were 
command not found!

So, I went to check my path. Low an behold, the *only* thing in my path 
was a few directories under the new publican installation! I began 
fixing my path (can't remember everything that was in it, but it 
probably needed purged anyway, so no big deal). Anyway, once I fixed my 
path and added quite a few directories back into it (including 
C:\Windows\System32) publican could then execute cmd.exe just fine and 
all is working fine.

But... that install bug is a doosy! Your path is not something you 
"backup" frequently. I could see how that could be extremely frustrating 
for some who install publican.

I was asked on #docbook to report this problem to the mailing list, so 
there it is. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, hey... It sure was 
nice having everything installed for docbook with one installer! Thanks!

Jeremy Cowgar