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

At Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:01:27 -0600, Jay McCarthy wrote:
> 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.

I imagine that we need to make `raco pkg` attempt to rename a directory
to something like "trash" when the directory can't be deleted (and
purge any found "trash" directories that can be deleted).

> > 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?

Yes, `raco setup` does that in v5.90.x, but it didn't in v5.3.6.

> > 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.

As Robby says, that's the default in v5.90.x, but it wasn't the default
(and not available as an option, if I remember correctly) in v5.3.6.