Re: Workshop to save M$ Windows users - help needed

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 15:29, Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com> wrote:
>
> url-retrieve-synchronously2 had a bug
>
> this works and should dispose the nework buffer properly:


Hi Tomas (and all),

Here are some updates on the problem of using eev to install wget.exe
on Windows machines.  Remember that I have good reasons to suppose the
most of the people who will participate in my workshop have never used
terminals and don't even know well enough what is a directory.


1. PowerShell
=============
Someone told me to take a look at PowerShell.  Apparently it has a
built-in wget, and it is somewhat multi-platform-ish.  I installed it
on my Debian box.  Its main executable is called pwsh.  Pwsh doesn't
run well on comint buffers - it says that the terminal is not powerful
enough.  It works well on vterm and ansi-term, and so I added support
for ansi-term to eev, and I defined a function eepitch-pwsh that uses
ansi-term.  I tested its built-in wget on my Debian, and it works
nice.  I found a friend - who uses Windows but who has never used
terminals - who volunteered to help with the tests.  It turns out that
on Windows the PowerShell executable is called powershell, not pwsh,
and it doesn't run well in an ansi-term, but it runs in comint.  We
tried the scripts that I prepared and they did't work - the wget
built-in in my friend's PowerShell behaved in a way totally different
from what I expected, and when we used it to download a 400KB file it
saved to disk something that had 2MB.  Then my friend found this:

https://superuser.com/questions/362152/native-alternative-to-wget-in-windows-powershell/758510#758510

And then we decided that using PowerShell would be bad karma, and we
gave up.



2. url-retrieve-synchronously
=============================
My friend was having a lot of fun executing sexps, so I decided to use
`url-retrieve-synchronously' to implement a kind of very primitive
fake wget in elisp - obs: I haven't tried your code from

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2021-10/msg00073.html
  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2021-10/msg00075.html

yet, but I will soon! - and I got this:

  http://angg.twu.net/eev-current/eev-plinks.el#find-urlretrieve
  (find-wget-elisp "http://angg.twu.net/eev-current/eev-plinks.el";
"ee-very-primitive-wget0")



3. wget.exe
===========
There's a wget for Windows here:

  http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm
  http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wget-1.11.4-1-bin.zip

• (eepitch-shell)
• (eepitch-kill)
• (eepitch-shell)

  rm -Rv /tmp/wget/
  mkdir  /tmp/wget/
  cd     /tmp/wget/
  wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wget-1.11.4-1-bin.zip
  unzip wget-1.11.4-1-bin.zip

  file bin/wget.exe
  # bin/wget.exe: PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386 (stripped to
  # external PDB), for MS Windows

I unpacked the .zip in my machine, uploaded the wget.exe to a
temporary place in my homepage, and my friend downloaded it with my
function `ee-very-primitive-wget0'.  The download worked - the file
was not corrupted, it seems - but when he tried to execute that
wget.exe he got a message saying that that file was not compatible
with the version of Windows that we was using - which is "Microsoft
Windows 11 Home Single Language".


That's what we did today. More news soon...

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://angg.twu.net/#eev