[racket] many permissions & other problems using packages in 5.3.6... workarounds?

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 3:02 PM, John Clements
<clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
> My students are using 5.3.6 with packages... in particular, with the rsound
> package, that depends on the portaudio package. They've had a wide variety
> of problems; I'm hoping that these are fixed in 5.90, but short of telling
> my whole class to install a pre-release version, I'm not sure how to test
> that, so I'm just going to list them, and maybe y'all can tell me they've
> been fixed.
>
> 1) The most pervasive problem is one of permissions on Windows, where an
> update gets jammed because DrR can't delete the existing directory. This
> seems to happen pretty much every time a windows user updates. Nearly all of
> my students now know how to navigate to AppData/Roaming/Racket to delete
> these directories.

I don't know what this means.

> 2) In 5.3.6, is there a menu-based way to run "raco setup rsound"? I haven't
> found one. I'm betting there's a way to do it in DrR, but for the moment I'm
> just steering students through starting up the Command Prompt. This is an
> issue whenever my students update the package (portaudio) that rsound
> depends on. Perhaps I'm missing something here.

At the most basic level, we could ask for a GUI, but I think it would
be better to make it not needed.

Why does rsound need to run setup again after portaudio? Matthew,
should we run "raco setup" on all the collects of all the packages an
updated package dependees on?

> 3) There's a "just plain bug" where installing the depending package
> (rsound) without installing the depended-on package asks "do you want to
> install the depended-on package" (paraphrased)... but takes its stdin from a
> port that's already closed, so the install window goes into a busy loop of
> #<EOF>-ing that requires a very forceful quit.

It should be using the --deps=auto where there is no question asked at
all. Matthew, do you know how the GUI calls install? But also, I can
fix this problem.

> 4) Finally, a student of mine tells me he just got this bug while trying to
> install; I have no idea what's going on here, yet:
>
> hash-ref: contract violation
> expected: hash?
>
> given: '��wXR
>
> argument position: 1st
> other arguments...:
> 'source
> context...:
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\pkg\lib.rkt:459:2: install-package228
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\pkg\lib.rkt:449:0: install-packages55
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\racket\file.rkt:295:8
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\racket\file.rkt:284:0:
> call-with-file-lock24
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\mrlib\terminal.rkt:150:7
> C:\Program Files
> (x86)\Racket\collects\mred\private\wx\common\queue.rkt:451:6
> C:\Program Files
> (x86)\Racket\collects\mred\private\wx\common\queue.rkt:502:32
> C:\Program Files (x86)\Racket\collects\racket\private\more-scheme.rkt:146:2:
> call-with-break-parameterization
> C:\Program Files
> (x86)\Racket\collects\mred\private\wx\common\queue.rkt:397:18: loop
>

This was an error with the S3 move. I'm pretty sure I just fixed it.

Jay

> Sorry for all the grousing.
>
> Thanks!
>
> John
>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93