[publican-list] Win32 Installer Woes

[Jeff Fearn]

Hi Jeremy, which version of Windows was this?

I've tested the uninstaller on XP and Vista, and it worked OK.

I added some checks to the uninstaller where it removes the paths,
hopefully this will avoid nulling the path when uninstalling an
incomplete install.

Cheers, Jeff.

On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 19:00 -0400, Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
> 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
> 
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-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY