retriever.exe not working in Windows 7 professional

[weecology]

retriever.exe not working in Windows 7 professional

[ethanwhite]

Thanks for reporting the problem. We've certainly tested on Windows 7 Pro. Could you confirm that there is a Scripts folder (in the same directory as the executable), that it contains some scripts, and that if you delete it and run the retriever again that you still have the same problem.

[dmcglinn]

Yes I can confirm that there is a scripts folder in the same directory with some scripts and if you delete the scripts folder and turn on the retriever it will create a new scripts folder and download scripts to that folder.

[bendmorris]

I'm thinking the issue might be the interaction between multiple versions of scripts and the retriever on the same machine. There have been some significant changes since the last release. This problem isn't present in the master branch.

[ethanwhite]

Is it pulling the scripts from the wrong place? Because we'd tested the heck out of 1.2 so I wonder if the scripts changed in Master and it's pulling from Master (or alternatively some change got pushed to 1.2 that shouldn't have)?

[bendmorris]

I checked that; the master scripts all have "#retriever" at the top of the Python script now, but the scripts on Dan's machine didn't. It doesn't seem like any changes have been pushed to 1.2's scripts for the past two months either.

[ethanwhite]

This has now been confirmed on multiple operating systems and as of the last time that Ben and I talked we don't really understand how this could have broken at this point. We're planning on rolling a new release shortly.

[bendmorris]

The Retriever is looking for the scripts in the correct location, but getting a 404 error. For example: https://raw.github.com/weecology/retriever/v1.2/scripts/bbs.py

Accessing this file via a browser or wget works just fine. Trying to use urllib or urllib2 to open it results in a 404 error.

[bendmorris]

Updated to use urllib.urlretrieve, which seems to work where urllib.urlopen does not. This is unfortunate because it means no progress bar when updating to the latest version in Windows, but it seems to work this way.

This has been solved in the master branch, so it will no longer be a problem in the next release.

[bendmorris]

Actually, using the reporthook parameter it is possible to get output from urlretrieve, so there shouldn't be any difference between the working version and the previous version.

[ethanwhite]

Wow, that's a weird one. Nice job tracking it down.