How to deal with it Scoop refreshing PATH and erasing variables references?

[nonatorw]

I recently started to use scoop at my work computer, and I have environment variables that I need to include in the PATH to use some tools that scoop can't manage. However, every time that I run scoop update --all or scoop cleanup --all, all my variables included in the PATH are changed for their absolute paths. It is troublesome because some of that variables need to be changed at runtime.

So, I don't know the impact of this suggestion to the whole project, but... why scoop doesn't use environment variables (that can be included in the PATH) and update them, instead of put the applications' paths directly in the PATH, refreshing it and killing every variable's reference?

Individual environment variables for each app, depending on the quantity of apps to include in the environment, could be troublesome to manage. However, working in that way could avoid problems of compatibility with other apps that are not managed by scoop.

A complementar suggestion: to declare a SCOOP_APPS_PATH variable, and include all scoop managed's apps in it, and then do reference to it in the PATH variable.

[rashil2000]

Hi, could you post your feedback in the issue tracker - here #1813?

[nonatorw]

Done.

[r15ch13]

Okay, it seems we are destroying users PATH variables since the dawn of time:

Scoop/lib/init.ps1

Lines 6 to 9 in aa3826c

	function env($name,$val) {
	if($val) { [environment]::setEnvironmentVariable($name,$val,'User') } # set
	else { [environment]::getEnvironmentVariable($name, 'User') } # get
	}

Brought to attention via #5395
Related: #1813
Samples for handling this issue:

• choco Update-SessionEnvironment.ps1
• choco Get-EnvironmentVariable.ps1
• choco Get-EnvironmentVariableNames.ps1
• choco Set-EnvironmentVariable.ps1

This needs to be implemented in the installer and Scoop itself:

• Should handle %% Variables with and without resolving them
• Update User env after changes (e.g. installing Scoop itself and programs)
• Adding a SCOOP_PATH variable to free up space in PATH