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PSPICE-TI installer creates an environment variable HOME ...

Andy Peters
Genius 3945 points

On a Win7-64 machine here. I just installed PSPICE-TI and activated it and played around with it for a bit. Then I got back to real work and fired up emacs for some VHDL editing and I noticed that all of my vhdl-mode customizations were missing. I started to fix that and when I saved my options, I noticed that emacs was saving them to C:\SPB_Data\.emacs instead of the standard C:\Users\myname\.emacs.

After some more digging I noticed that the PSPICE install created an environment variable called HOME which points to C:\SPB_Data\! And that breaks anything that looks for such an environment variable.

Thanks a lot for that bug.

I deleted the environment variable. I don't know what this will affect.

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 29035 points

    Hi Andy,

    The developers are looking into this issue and will update this shortly.

    Thanks,
    JC

  • 0 in reply to JC Zhu
    TI__Mastermind 29035 points

    Hi Andy,

    As with any environment variables, there's no guarantee it will not collide with another program.

    To mitigate that, PSpice for TI would check if the variable already exists on your system and if found, will not alter it.

    That means you can try the following workaround:

    Create an environment variable HOME and set its value to your emacs default directory, then install PSpice for TI.

    This way, emacs will function as before. PSpice for TI will use the same location to store downloaded models and example projects.

    Let us know if this approach works.

    Thanks,
    JC

  • 0 in reply to JC Zhu
    Genius 3945 points

    JC Zhu - Simulation with PSpice said:

    Hi Andy,

    As with any environment variables, there's no guarantee it will not collide with another program.

    To mitigate that, PSpice for TI would check if the variable already exists on your system and if found, will not alter it.

    The surprise was that I didn't expect PSpice to create an environment variable in the first place. The variable did not exist prior to PSpice installation. And the further surprise is that other programs use it if it exists. Not only Emacs but there are reports of other software doing this.

    That means you can try the following workaround:

    Create an environment variable HOME and set its value to your emacs default directory, then install PSpice for TI.

    This way, emacs will function as before. PSpice for TI will use the same location to store downloaded models and example projects.

    But then PSpice will want to put the SPB_Data directory, I assume, in the same place as my .emacs -- and why would I want to do that?

    Maybe if PSpice [I]asked[/I] the user where it wanted to put its cruft!

  • 0 in reply to Andy Peters
    TI__Mastermind 29035 points

    Andy,

    Many programs set and use environment variables. What surprised me was that emacs has this optional HOME. The first thing I checked was my .vimrc (no kidding). Anyways, I am sure there're other programs like emacs as well.

    What I described is a workaround which does not disturb emacs. You are right that PSpice will put the SPB_Data directory there and you may not want that. The difficult part is, even if you specify where that should go, it is stored in the HOME variable, so, we're back to square one.

    Using a different variable name may help (lower possibility of collision) but it requires careful consideration due to the large installation base. We'll let you know once we find something better than the workaround above.

    Thanks,
    JC

  • 0 in reply to JC Zhu
    Genius 3945 points

    Hi, JC,

    I uninstalled PSpice, created the environment variable HOME and set it to the usual roaming profile thingie, and then I reinstalled PSPice entirely, and it seems to work without incident. I can't tell whether it actually cares about the SPB_Data directory at all -- it's still in C:\SPB_Data. 

    I did notice this time that the installer asked for a directory for designs etc -- I actually made sure it had a valid path. 

    It all seems to work. Especially emacs, which is sort of the center of my world.

    Thanks,

    -a