[Qgis-developer] external programs in QGIS and plugins need configurable location

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:48 PM, William Kyngesburye
<woklist at kyngchaos.com> wrote:
> Kind of a bug/feature request for plugins in general, though it was brought to my attention for the GDAL tools plugin.
>
> At least on OS X (maybe Windows?) applications (the GUI, bundle type, like Qgis) do not get anything from the shell environment, like the PATH.  For any use of external CLI programs, applications will fail to find them in the PATH as would happen when run from the Terminal.  There is one "official" way, but it's not well documented (if at all) or known, and is still clunky and un-Mac-like.
>
> Plugins that use external programs, ie GDAL Tools using the GDAL programs, need a configuration option to set and save the path to those programs.
>

 So although a properly set PATH exists on both these platforms it
seems to not be passed through to applications that might want to make
use of it? Seems dumb to expect any application that is going to
launch executables to have to keep record of paths and rig up a dialog
to let the user change it... Operating Systems are supposed to sort
this out for us...

 Is this for executables launched via Qt (using maybe QProcess) and/or
things launched with the usual C++ or Python launch codes?

 Odd

Barry