Re: [Dev-luatex] os.spawn and AR crash mystery resolved

Hi Tomek, T T a écrit :

On 22 April 2010 00:03, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

...

Yeah, that's really amazing. Maybe something with the environment that would propagate differently using spawn/exec vs execute?

Manuel, you've been on the right track all along. I finally (almost) got to the bottom of it.

The problem is the same as reported in the past for texdoc:

http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/dev-luatex/2008-September/001771.html

It comes from kpathsea, which changes \ to / in USERPRIFILE var and this leads to the dreaded AR crash with "internal error occurred".

Very nice catch!

I've been unable so far to locate at which point this substitution happens, but at least there is an easy fix for that, which I will commit shortly:

os.setenv("USERPROFILE", os.getenv("USERPROFILE"):gsub('/', '\\'))

Sounds good, while waiting for a proper fix in the engine.

But it gets even more interesting. This change doesn't seem to happen really in the environment but only in the environ variable exported from the kpathsea lib. This explains why os.execute() works (as reported in the texdoc thread referenced above) and os.spawn() doesn't. With os.execute() the child process inherits the environment automatically from its parent, while os.spawn() is implemented using _spawnvpe() with the environ variable passed for the environment.

Nice catch again! I'm very glad to finally understand this so mysterious problem. Thank you for getting to the bottom of it, Tomek! Manuel.