2009/11/23 Taco Hoekwater :

Let's put it this way: windows command line processing does not agree with my neurons, so I have stayed way from it as much as possible (and will continue to do so).

Yes, I know it's PITA.

A good, clean patch would be welcome of course, but I myself will not spend any more time on the stuff, not even for bug reports, as all that would be accomplished by doing so is that it would give me a headache, and there are much more pleasing ways to reach that state.

OK, I'm looking into that. Cheers, Tomek

T T wrote:

2009/11/23 T T :

...

OK, I'm looking into that.

After some digging through the sources and googling around I think the problem is not with luatex's implementation but with _spawnvpe function on Windows, which can't handle arguments with spaces (how pathetic). So I should write to M$ now, I guess. Sigh. At least there is a workaround with setting arg[0] explicitly, but some note to unwary in the documentation would be good as well.

maybe it's an option to reserve arg[0] for the (optional) path and set the path explicitely (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa273351%28VS.60%29.aspx) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On 23 November 2009 Taco Hoekwater wrote:

Let's put it this way: windows command line processing does not agree with my neurons, so I have stayed way from it as much as possible (and will continue to do so).

A good, clean patch would be welcome of course, [...]

Hi Taco, if you change anything though, please inform the TeX Live team in advance. We probably have to adapt our scripts then. The scripts already provide a function: function fixwin (args_unix) if os.type == 'windows' then local args_win={} -- new table args_win[0]=args_unix[1] for i=1, #args_unix do args_win[i]='"'..args_unix[i]..'"' end return args_win else return args_unix end end Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

2009/11/24 Hans Hagen :

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

...

On 23 November 2009 Taco Hoekwater wrote:

 > Let's put it this way: windows command line processing does not  > agree with my neurons, so I have stayed way from it as much as  > possible (and will continue to do so).  >  > A good, clean patch would be welcome of course, [...]

Hi Taco, if you change anything though, please inform the TeX Live team in advance.  We probably have to adapt our scripts then.  The scripts already provide a function:

don't worry changes in these mechanism will never show up in stable versions unannounced as it will likely influence many; of course, as long as luatex functionality is not declared frozen we take the freedom to change things, but in this case the fact that texlua is used for scripts in tex distributions asks for extra care

as far as i can see the main problem is *not* in the interface, it's just that the underlying windows function cannot deal with spaces in the program location specification and that (at some point) probably be solved in a compatible way

I could it give a go and try to implement something that makes sense on Windows. The _spawnvpe function takes four arguments and two of them, cmdname (command path/name) and argv array, are of interest here. There are two cases to consider: (1) String argument cmd_string to os.exec/os.spawn It doesn't make sense to parse this string into argv, because _spawnvpe will concatenate it back into single string anyway (because that's required by CreateProcess API), but any quotation of arguments will be lost on the way (because _spawnvpe is incredibly dumb). Instead we can take: argv[0] := cmd_string argv[1] := NULL cmdname = <first argument from cmd_string striped from quotes> This way we can full _spawnvpe to pass the command string as is directly to the CreateProcess API. (2) Table argument cmd_table to os.exec/os.spawn argv := cmd_table if argv[0] == NULL { argv[0] = } The above changes do not change the behaviour of currently working cases, only the failing ones and those resulting in wrongly parsed arguments being passed to the child process are affected. If that proposal sounds OK to you, I will write a patch implementing it. Cheers, Tomek

2009/11/27 Taco Hoekwater :

T T wrote:

...

The above changes do not change the behaviour of currently working cases, only the failing ones and those resulting in wrongly parsed arguments being passed to the child process are affected.

If that proposal sounds OK to you, I will write a patch implementing it.

Yes, please do!

OK. I need to test the patch now, so a few questions more. A few days ago I managed to compile the current trunk on mingw (am I being lucky or is this officially supported?) but this takes ages. My changes are limited to just one file (loslibext.c). Is there some way to quickly rebuild only what's needed? Cheers, Tomek

T T wrote:

2009/11/27 Taco Hoekwater :

...

T T wrote:

...

The above changes do not change the behaviour of currently working cases, only the failing ones and those resulting in wrongly parsed arguments being passed to the child process are affected.

If that proposal sounds OK to you, I will write a patch implementing it. Yes, please do!

OK. I need to test the patch now, so a few questions more.

A few days ago I managed to compile the current trunk on mingw (am I being lucky or is this officially supported?) but this takes ages. My changes are limited to just one file (loslibext.c). Is there some way to quickly rebuild only what's needed?

build --make doesn't work for you? -- Pawe/l Jackowski P.Jackowski@gust.org.pl

2009/11/23 Hans Hagen :

arg = {    "dir",    "bar",    '"foo bar"', }

os.spawn(arg)

works ok, so without arg[0]

Yes, but your arg[1] has no spaces in it. Try running some program under %ProgramFiles% or other path with spaces. Cheers, Tomek