[llvm-dev] LLVM installer on Windows 10 64bit (and possibly others) claims to add self to path environment variable and to create a desktop shortcut but does neither.

[David Blaikie via llvm-dev]

Hans/Reid - do you folks know who, if anyone, uis maintaining the Windows
installers these days/whether they'd be interested in looking into this
further?

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 4:11 PM Jesse Bollinger via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> This isn't really a bug within LLVM itself, so I wasn't sure where to
> report this and don't have much reason to create an account right now
> either. So, I'm sending it here, hopefully not in error.
>
> Basically, as the subject line says, the LLVM binary install for Windows
> 10 64 bit (and likely other Windows distributions too) fails to set up
> environment variables and the shortcut, contrary to what it claims to do.
>
> In contrast, minutes before installing LLVM on this system, I installed
> CMake and that had no trouble at all modifying the path and creating a
> shortcut. Thus, the problem is very likely in the LLVM installer and not my
> system.
>
> I also recall the installer failing to change the path a few years back on
> a Windows 7 laptop I tried and I had to do it manually then too.
>
> While this issue is easily manually corrected, the existence of this bug
> in the install process is bound to decrease user retention among new
> inexperienced users significantly.
>
> Many newbie programmers won't be properly aware of how the path
> environment variable works and thus will just assume that Clang is
> bad/broken and not worth the trouble and then uninstall. So, this "trivial"
> issue actually probably has a big impact on Windows adoption among new
> users and needs fixed.
>
> Every little bit of friction in a process and every bit of uncertainty a
> user may have in how to move forward with a system will always damage
> retention/adoption rates. These little details do matter, even though many
> big open source software projects neglect these kinds of usability and
> communcation details.
>
> Anyway, have a great day/etc everyone.
>
> PS: I love how much better Clang's error messages are and how you can read
> the AST etc.
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