Executable version on Windows

[gustaphe]

It appears _get_version() does not get specialized for either matlab nor python on Windows. I suspect that this is because .exe is automatically tacked on the executable name, and then the lookup does not recognize it. The generic handler will not work for either program.

I am also not sure that Matlab specifically will print the message to the commandline, it would be better and faster to search the output of matlab -h for version_pattern_matlab = re.compile(r'(?<=Version: )(?P<version>\d.+)\b').

In a somewhat less relevant issue, SIGALRM is OS specific and not defined on Windows, but I guess it's supposed to crash anyway so it doesn't matter.

Error message

smt run -e matlab -m .\test.m parameters.m

Using C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2025a\bin\matlab.exe
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<frozen runpy>", line 198, in _run_module_as_main
  File "<frozen runpy>", line 88, in _run_code
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Scripts\smt.exe\__main__.py", line 7, in <module>
    sys.exit(smt())
             ~~~^^
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\cli\smt.py", line 32, in smt
    main(sys.argv[2:])
    ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\commands.py", line 411, in run
    executable = get_executable(path=executable_path)
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\programs.py", line 228, in get_executable
    program = Executable(path)
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\programs.py", line 77, in __init__
    self.version = version or self._get_version()
                              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\programs.py", line 104, in _get_version
    returncode, output, err = run("%s --version" % self.path,
                              ~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                  shell=True, timeout=5)
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\site-packages\sumatra\core.py", line 69, in run
    signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, alarm_handler)
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: module 'signal' has no attribute 'SIGALRM'. Did you mean: 'SIGABRT'?

[apdavison]

Sumatra doesn't get used much on Windows, we also haven't had many Matlab users, but this is an audience we'd like to grow, so thank you very much for the bug reports.

How comfortable are you with Python development? If you can fix the problems locally (where you can test them directly), and make a pull request, that would be ideal. Otherwise, I will find a Windows machine and take a look myself.

[gustaphe]

I gathered as much, but it looks like fairly superficial issues (knock on wood). Happy to help debug it.

I'm not super confident in Python, and especially the decorations make it difficult for me to figure out what order things go, but I can give this one a swing.

[gustaphe]

Okay, one of the issues is the reliance on shell=True for subprocess functions - it fails for filenames with spaces in them (I know, disgusting, but I'm not the one who set that up or decided it would be allowed). It's better to pass vectors of arguments with shell=False.

Another one is the way timing is set up. Using subprocess.run( ..., timeout=5) would be better than subprocess.Popenand signal.alarm - but that requires Python > 3.5, so how far back are you keeping compatibility?

Either way, I have some kind of version working for a python project, still trying to implement something with matlab, but it requires a bit more fiddling with the input arguments.

[apdavison]

how far back are you keeping compatibility?

see pyproject.toml - currently Python 3.9 or later.