From: Johan Holmberg <holmberg@...>
Date: 2002-06-16T07:14:16+09:00
Subject: system & changes to ENV on Windows



I try to use Ruby on Windows (NT),
but I noted that changes to the PATH environment variable didn't
affect how executables were found by "system".

It also seems that *no* environment-variable changes are propagated
to child processes.

I have looked at the Ruby source, and found some code (in hash.c)
that isn't used normally, but can be activated by the CPP symbol
USE_WIN32_RTL_ENV (the code seems to be copied from some old
version of Perl).

My questions are:

 - wouldn't Ruby be much more useful on Windows if it worked
   like other script-languages with regard to system, ENV and PATH ?

 - has anyone used the code enabled by the USE_WIN32_RTL_ENV
   symbol ?  Does the code work ?

 - if it works, wouldn't it be a good idea to have enabled by
   default ?


I'm using Ruby 1.6.6 built from source, and have also tried the
pre-compiled package provided at RubyCentral (ruby-166-0.exe).

/Johan Holmberg