Jeff Key

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Please enter a path that does not contain embedded spaces.

What year is this?  1983? 

I'm installing Borland's Optimizeit profiler and things aren't looking good so far.  I get to the second page of the installer, which is all done with bitmapped fonts that I can hardly read, and get the above message.  I'll continue on and hope that the people that wrote the installer had nothing to do with the actual product development, and are shot.

Posted: Nov 29 2003, 07:20 PM by jeffreykey | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Wallym said:

Oracle has a similar problem.

Wally
# November 30, 2003 9:24 AM

John Frazier (Borland) said:

You should never install any Java application to a path that has spaces. Whenever one of these paths has to be resolved to the classpath, bad things happen and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has problems. Since OptimizeIt is mostly written in Java, it is subject to this same precaution.
# December 1, 2003 5:22 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, John, I had no idea. You may want to enforce that requirement in the installer, as I chose a folder with spaces (assuming the installer was from another era) and it let me proceed.
# December 1, 2003 5:28 PM

John McGrath said:

I do not think the issue has anything to do with modernity ("What year is this?"), but rather with compatibility. Optimizeit must run other programs that do not deal well with spaces in file names, and it must pass them the names of files that are within its own directory tree. If it is installed into a directory that contains a space, those programs will not work properly.

Many of those programs were originally written on other operating systems such as *nix, where spaces are often used as delimeters so they do not work well in file names. Windows programs have similar (actually more) restrictions with other characters, such as ":", ";", and "\".
# December 4, 2003 3:13 AM