Ranting about the state of Python IDEs for Windows

[Carlos Ribeiro]

Alex,

Regarding the slash-backslash problem... I found the bug, it was not
hard, after all.

The problem was a side effect of the way DrPython builds some of its
environment variables, and the handling of double slashes in file
names.

At startup DrPython tries to detect the homedir. The code tries some
alternatives; if the envvars or the tilde options are not available,
and if the program is running under Win32, then it starts with "c:\".

A little bit later, it adds new path components to the path. Guess
what happens? The home dir becomes: "c:\\drpython"...

...but double slashes are invalid at that particular position. It
seems to be a side effect of the way network shares are named, of
course, although I fail to see why it should cause a problem in this
particular example. It's no problem if additional slashes are located
elsewhere into the middle of the path name.

I've fixed it and I'll send the fix to the DrPython guys. In fact, it
solved *all* issues I had with DrPython, including some strange
lockups that would last for minutes.

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com