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

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 08:00:11AM -0600, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> 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).

I might be misunderstanding the problem, but...

If Racket on Windows can't delete the directory because a file
downstream of that directory is open, then Windows will not allow
renaming the directory either.

Is Racket opening some file in that directory and holding it open?

Another possibility is that some other process has launched in that
directory or is holding a file open in that directory.

Process Explorer from Microsoft can be helpful in figuring out what
process is holding open which files:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

David