Well, strictly I was speaking of the solutions in the thread that I linked to, but that blog post is about the issue they discussed.

It seems to work fine if you take off the 'before make directory

Yeah, those forum/blog posts were from quite awhile ago, when xdef expected its first argument to be quoted (see http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt -- or any of the myriad other Lisp tutorials out there -- for an introduction to quoting).

but what exactly do I do with dev/urandom in both ac.scr and arc.arc?

I linked to that thread because it was relevant, though it didn't fix this specific bug: it's still true that pg expects Windows snafus to be fixed downstream. As rocketnia mentioned (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=12397), most seem to be solved by using Cygwin, which will give you /dev/urandom & such.

The outstanding issues I'm aware of are generally fixable outside of Cygwin, but would require a bit of code drudgery.

- The setuid bug, apparently fixed (by doing nothing when it's called, so I'm suspicious, but I don't know): http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10625.

- pipe-from in ac.scm runs rm -f, which could be replaced by Racket's delete-file wrapped in the proper error-catching code (http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/Filesystem.html#%28def...). It also uses /dev/urandom to generate a random filename, but that could be replaced by Racket's make-temporary-file (cf. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2333 and http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/Filesystem.html#%28def...).

- shash in arc.arc just uses openssl, which has a Windows binary that should work. It worked a few years ago, anyway: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=190. shash also creates a file in /tmp/, but that shouldn't be an issue, if I recall correctly from the few times I've run Arc on Windows.

- ensure-dir in arc.arc has been patched in that thread I linked to -- again, just using Racket's functions.

- load-items in news.arc has

  (system (+ "rm " storydir* "*.tmp"))

I did try the site for a bit, its quite cool. Was trying to learn some schema earlier on, but totally lost as to how to get arc to launch.

Well I'm glad I asked because the above instructions presume you're on a Unix-based system (Linux, Mac OS X) working from the command line.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with how to get Arc installed on Windows. Here's one guide on the topic [1], but I can't vouch for its accuracy. If you want to find more related resources, try using http://af.searchyc.com/ to search this forum for posts that mention "Windows".

By cd, do you mean the windows command prompt?

Yes. cd is a standard command on shells for both Windows and Unix to change the current directory.

---

1) Get Racket. http://racket-lang.org/

2) Get Arc. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254

3) Make a batch file that'll run an Arc REPL for me when I double-click it. Here's my batch file, with a boatload of comments to help you figure out what I'm doing: http://gist.github.com/576688 There's probably some room for improvement, but it's what I'm happily using at the moment. (Note that it crashes a bit if you close the terminal window while Racket 5.0.1 is running, instead of exiting via a Racket (exit) call or an Arc (quit) call. I think this is a Racket issue, since previous versions don't crash that way.)

4) Make some necessary changes to Arc so that it stops giving errors on Windows. There are two main issues here. For Arc to start at all, you'll need to fix 'setuid (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10625). Then, if you also want to run web applications, you'll probably need to fix the system call to mkdir (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4652), and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other system calls breaks too.

Also, I highly recommend rlwrap. See this thread: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10

I have added the following to my .bash_profile (probably the Mac equivalent of .bashrc):

  export PATH=/Applications/Racket\ v5.0/bin:$PATH
  alias arc='rlwrap -c -r -l ~/Documents/ARC_LOG -q "\"" -C arc racket -i -f ~/Dropbox/arc3.1/as.scm'

  (parameterize ((current-directory (current-load-relative-directory)))
    (aload "arc.arc")
    (aload "libs.arc") 
    
    (aload "sh.arc")) ;my stuff

Trying to figure out the dev\urandom problem now