Embarcadero entries in the path

[pyscripter 689]

I remember @David Heffernan saying that the first thing he does when installing a new Delphi version is to remove the Embarcadero entries in the Windows path.   Do I remember well?  Are there any downsides to doing that?

[Stefan Glienke 2003]

Matters if you have many different versions installed which can be typical for library or component developers - and every installation puts quite a bit into the path environment variable.

 

Here is how mine looks (I have XE, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 installed - and so far it's ok on Windows 10):

 

 

I did not do the work yet on this Machine but on my older Win8.1 machine i had everything from Delphi 2010 to 10.3 installed and that completely blew the max length of the path variable so I substituted the common parts of the paths (such as programfiles or public documents)

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

I once wrote a tool for that: https://uweraabe.kilnhg.com/Code/Community/Delphi/CompressPath

Edited May 29, 2020 by Uwe Raabe

[Vincent Parrett 750]

We see a spike in traffic visiting this post on our site after every delphi release  - how-to-fix-your-system-path-after-installing-delphi

 

It's rather sad that it's the second most popular post on our blogs (after the DUnitX introduction post).

[pyscripter 689]

Thank you all for your answers.  What is wrong with removing all these entries.  Does this cause Rad Studio to malfunction?

[Guest]

3 hours ago, pyscripter said:

What is wrong with removing all these entries.  Does this cause Rad Studio to malfunction?

I always remove most of those entries in the PATH, never saw a problem, on contrary i use a tool "Rapid Environment Editor" from https://www.rapidee.com/en/screenshots even have it on my desktop as it is portable, i am using it to mess around with PATH folders when testing application to make sure the right folders always been accessed, never saw complain from Delphi IDE.

 

Note : Rapid Environment Editor has the ability to save and restore among many things, and one specific functionality is to convert long path to short and vice versa,

[David Heffernan 2345]

3 hours ago, pyscripter said:

Thank you all for your answers.  What is wrong with removing all these entries.  Does this cause Rad Studio to malfunction?

I remove them all. I don't have any problems.

 

It means I can use any of the many versions I have installed easily.

 

For versioned packages, e.g. vcl270.bpl then multiple entries are fine. But for non versioned tools, e.g. dcc32.exe then it's a mess.

 

These days it just feels a bit weak to rely on the path to find libraries. I always place them in the executable directory, or in sub directories and use SxS assemblies. 

 

I remove all entries and then my build scripts set up the appropriate environment for the target version, and then call msbuild.

 

Works for me but I'm sure there are other ways. 

 

 

[dummzeuch 1505]

If you want to use the"stand alone" tools in GExperts, you might find that they don't work if the bpl files it needs are not in the search path. These tools call the dll, the dll is an IDE plugin, an IDE plugin needs some bpls, so there is no way around that (other than making those tools not use the dll).