An extremely common method of provisioning Windows-based hosts for general use is to utilize various "package managers" to perform software installs -- The two most popular options are:
- Chocolatey (
www.chocolatey.org)
- Scoop (
https://scoop.sh/)
Both of these package managers will install "shims", which are simply wrapper executables, into a single directory that can be statically added to the PATH environment variable for ease of software dependency management. This, however, does not work well with a couple of the QuickBuild build steps:
- Gradle
- Maven
The reason for this is that the code is hard-coded to look for *.BAT or *.CMD files to execute on Windows, and I would like to enhance this behavior in one of the following ways:
- Add *.EXE as a final fallback to search for
- Add GRADLE_EXECUTABLE_EXTENSIONS to the Gradle integration plugin; Add MAVEN_EXECUTABLE_EXTENSIONS to the Maven integration plugin
The support provided by either one of these would save us countless hours of downtime required due to having to change environment variables ("symlink" directories don't always work with all software options) and restart the entire farm.