The installer overwrote my PATH!

[benburrill]

Instead of simply appending to the PATH, this ocaml installer decided that it would be a good idea to completely overwrite it, setting it to the value C:\Users\[me]\AppData\Roaming\OCaml\bin. This broke everything; luckily for me I had a registry backup from a while ago which I searched through and found an old PATH setting, but this kind of behavior is extremely unexpected for an installer.

[protz]

Did you use the latest version of the installer? That problem used to exist for the 3.12 series only. Perhaps you had a super long PATH variable in the first place?

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On 1/30/17 5:27 PM, Potato42 wrote: Instead of simply appending to the |PATH|, this ocaml installer decided that it would be a good idea to completely overwrite it, setting it to the value |C:\Users\[me]\AppData\Roaming\OCaml\bin|. This broke everything; luckily for me I had a registry backup from a while ago which I searched through and found an old |PATH| setting, but this kind of behavior is extremely unexpected for an installer. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#52>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AANGs0yvP91v2Xl5pd7F_sLDZaHRVBPDks5rXo3wgaJpZM4LyIhG>.

[benburrill]

Did you use the latest version of the installer?

I used the ocaml-4.02.3-x86_64-mingw64-installer4-opam.exe installer from http://protz.github.io/ocaml-installer/

super long PATH variable

I don't know what "super long" means. The result of echo %PATH% is 1674 characters long right now. I don't see why the environment variable being long would cause the installer to overwrite the variable like it did and I am able to append long strings to my PATH using set, although I have not tried using setx or anything like that.

[protz]

There has been a long history of bugs in NSIS, since they used fixed-length strings... 😱 The easiest solution to solve this would just be to switch to a different installer technology.