Re: We're doing it wrong. [WAS]: Zip utility on Windows for ODT exporter

[John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Loyall, David
<david.loyall@nebraska.gov> wrote:
>> Just tried [...X] and don't have the [... utility] that Org is looking for.
>
> And that's why civilized programs don't depend on external executables from $PATH.
>
> Now, I'd imagine that some people have argued in the past that org shouldn't depend on external executables.  Clearly those arguments have failed.
>
> But, let's take a fresh look.  How about this rule of thumb: don't depend on external executables **from $PATH**.

That, and I'm not sure that "zip" was working on Windows anyway. I had
to edit ox-taskjuggler and change it to "zip.exe." Could be wrong, as
I ran into an issue where Wiz.exe from Info-zip gave an error when I
renamed it zip.exe and said it "couldn't find itself." Thus, I named
it back to Wiz.exe and created a hardlink to it called zip.exe. I
tried renaming to just 'zip' to satisfy Org, but then Windows doesn't
recognize it as an executable...

Thus, I resorted to editing ox-taskjuggler on Windows to do it's path
check on "zip.exe."

>
> Can we agree on that?
>
> How about: don't depend on external executables from $PATH, but allow the user to override via config.
>
> This is important on the 'reproducible research' front.
>

Agree -- let the user specify the path to the thing to use. Kind of like this:

#+begin_doc

org-ditaa-jar-path is a variable defined in `org-exp-blocks.el'.
Its value is
"~/.elisp/org.git/contrib/scripts/ditaa.jar"

Documentation:
Path to the ditaa jar executable.

#+end_doc

> Cheers,
> --Dave

Thanks for chiming in.


John