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"))