[Agda] Re: panic error message on Windows

[Aaron Stump]

Hi, Agda community.

Just a follow-up on my email of a couple weeks back, about a mysterious 
"Panic" error message from Agda (see below).

It seems that on Windows 8, some other programs, like apparently Adobe 
Acrobat, have a bad habit of changing the permissions of the Windows 
temp directory to be read-only.  See this forum discussion, for example:

http://www.eightforums.com/user-accounts-family-safety/27720-set-permissions-user-appdata-local-temp-folder.html

Agda does not like this, of course, since it needs to write to the temp 
directory.

This is not a bug in Agda, but rather bad behavior from other programs 
in the Windows 8 ecosystem.  Just for others who may run into this.

Best wishes,
Aaron

On 02/07/2014 03:14 PM, Aaron Stump wrote:
> Hi, Agda community.
>
> For my big (> 90 students) undergrad this semester which is using Agda 
> 2.3.2, we are occasionally getting disturbing reports from Windows 
> users of receiving the following error message from Agda under emacs:
>
> Panic: invalid range when printing error:
> C:\Users\TheStudent\AppData\Local\Temp\: openTempFile: permission denied
> (Permission denied)
>
> This is a nasty one, as we don't know even a workaround.  I do find 
> some discussion on ghc list archives about openTempFile having a 
> problem if the file is actually a directory, or something like this -- 
> but the issue was supposedly fixed long ago in ghc.
>
> Any ideas how to work around this problem?
>
> Thanks,
> Aaron