It’s been several months since I last did any software development on Windows, and in that amount of time I seem to have forgotten all of the defensive little tics that one acquires when working in that OS. Some of these (like rebooting the machine every fifteen minutes)  I’m quite happy to forget.  Unfortunately, it would have saved me some time earlier today if I had remembered to avoid installing command-line tools on a path that includes the space character.  This includes programs like java, ruby, subversion, etc., and means that when using a Windows Installer to set up these programs, you absolutely, positively MUST override the default install location, typically “C:\Program Files\<program name>”.

I failed to do this earlier today, and then had problems trying to build WebDriver from source.  I had dutifully added the Java bin directory to my PATH environment variable, and had even made sure to wrap that entry in quotes because it had a space in it.  Me so clever!  I could then call javac from the command line without any problems.  

However, the WebDriver build uses Rake, which in turn uses Ruby.  It seems that the “One-Click Installer” version of Ruby that I’m using can’t parse PATHs that include spaces–even if those spaces have been wrapped in quotes.  The net effect was that Rake couldn’t locate javac, as if I hadn’t even installed the JDK.  Reinstalling the JDK at c:\java\jdk1.6.0 and adjusting the PATH accordingly sorted it all out quite nicely.

Whoops, time to reboot!