MSI Installer Problem: can't install 2.4a2 on new install of Win2kSP2

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Fri Aug 27 15:42:53 EDT 2004


Richard Hanson wrote:
> For academic purposes, there may be information below that still
> suggests some strangeness (at least to me and my machine) re PATH on
> Windows, or re having Python in another OS's PATH variable, or both. 

I'm not quite sure why you have the Win98 path in W2k, but it may be
that W2k also executes certain autoexec things.

> So, while I don't understand why having a separate OS on a different
> partition affected 2.4a2 on Win2k as above (remembering that 2.3.4 on
> Win2k worked fine with that configuration), I'm quite happy that I can
> now get back to using Python rather than trying to get my laptop
> "assembled." :-)

That might be a subtle bug. Python tries to find out its own executable
path name, in order to find the location to the Python installation. It
considers two alternatives
a) argv[0] contains a \. If so, python.exe was fully qualified, so we
    know the path.
b) if there is no \, python.exe must be on the PATH. So we look there,
    and find one in C:\python23, and believe this is us. This logic is
    flawed, as we should *first* look into the current directory (I
    think)

 From then on, everything fails: we load the 2.3 library, which has a
different sre version. So regular expressions don't work, and that
causes pretty much everything to break.

What surprises me, though, that this algorithm is *only* executed
if GetModuleFileName fails, which should not happen in your case...

Regards,
Martin



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