[Openmcl-devel] CCL on Windows

[Ron Garret]

I'm trying to help someone with a CCL project that they have to deliver on Windows, so I held my nose, fired up Parallels, and downloaded ccl-1.8-windowsx86.zip.  I fired it up, it briefly flashed a window on the screen which promptly vanished without a trace.

Ah, I said to myself, now I remember why I don't use Windows.

But I really would like to be able to help people who want to run CCL on Windows, so I'm kind of morbidly curious about how one goes about debugging problems like this.  When it comes to Windows, I am completely at sea.  I have never done any Windows development.  I have never used Windows for more than an hour or so at a time (which is about all I can take).  I'm at a conceptual loss, a complete and utter newbie.  How do you even get started when you don't have a shell?  That is not a rhetorical question by the way.  How do I run SVN?  How do I figure out what version of Windows I'm running?  How can I tell if I'm running 32 or 64 bit?  I know it's some ancient version of XP running under Parallels.  Is CCL even expected to work?

OMG, Windows is truly hellish.  I just tried to find a Windows binary SVN installer.  After several blind alleys I finally found the Apache SVN site which had half a dozen choices of binaries maintained by volunteers.  I picked one at random, and it crashed IE.  I tried Chrome.  It didn't work (it just gives me an hourglass no matter what I do -- even Settings won't come up).  Tried FireFox.  It worked, got a SVN binary installer package, ran it, it worked.  But the only thing it seems to have installed is documentation and license files.  There's no hint of a SVN executable anywhere.  Finally found the executable (I guess they hide it as a sort of filter to insure that you can't run it unless you have a certain minimal level of technical expertise), and it does the same flashy-crashy thing as CCL.    How does anyone put up with this shit?  (Now THAT is a rhetorical question.)

Anyway, if someone could point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

rg