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The searchpath is the directory.xml value that is used by the FWD runtime to represent the PROPATH. Since FWD does not interpret source code, it is not used at runtime for finding programs in the physical file system. Instead it is used by the SourceNameMapper to interpret the name mapping data stored at conversion time. In addition, searchpath is used at runtime for physical searches on the client file system for resources.

Recently, Eugenie found that the searchpath entry is still being encoded with a system-specific path separator character. The same directory can could be used to run a client on Linux could not be used to run a client on Windows, because the directory had the searchpath defined with : (the Linux/UNIX path separator) and when run on Windows FWD tried to parse with ; (the Windows path separator). When this failed, the client could not work.

The original searchpath implementation (for PROPATH assignment) was implemented in #1590 by Costin Savin and some fixes were made in #2130 by Eugenie. But the implementation still had the platform-specific dependency in the directory entry.

In digging into this issue, many of us thought this had already been handled in #3225. In fact, code had been written to address this issue, but that code was in branch 3225b which has not yet been merged to trunk.

Ovidiu: you aren't going crazy. :)

I am currently reviewing that code with the intention to merge it into 3394a. Before I do that, I would like to know if there is anything left incomplete about those changes. There is no post in #3225 about 3225b and I don't really know the status.

Ovidiu: The changes are non-trivial, so I'm hoping you may have some notes about the status of branch 3225b.

I almost completely forgot about #3225. I took a quick look over it. The 3225b contains only a single altered file: EnvironmentOps. The changes try to handle the : issue, too, beside handling the path duplication issue and code maintenance. I worked with constants defined in Configuration and EnvironmentOps so, if we change the P2J_PATH_SEP = ",", the existing solution might work.