What's the safe, easy way to install noweb on Windows 10?

Question

Apparently there's only one person that managed to do it. I'm following his installations step by step precisely, but I do not have the iconc compiler. Following the instructions of the Makefile, I'm using icont (which I do have), but then Jim's instructions do not work at all.

$ make install
[...]
cp totex disambiguate noidx tohtml elide l2h docs2comments autodefs.tex autodefs.icon autodefs.yacc autodefs.sml autodefs.pascal autodefs.promela autodefs.lrtl autodefs.asdl autodefs.mmix xchunks pipedocs /c/nowebFiles/usr/local/noweb/lib
cp: cannot stat `totex': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `disambiguate': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `noidx': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `tohtml': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `elide': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `l2h': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `docs2comments': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `xchunks': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `pipedocs': No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/Melba/noweb-2.11b/src/icon'
make: *** [install-code] Error 2

The problem here is that icont creates totex.icx and not totex . Is this due to my not having iconc and am using icont instead? I installed icont from its homepage and it did not seem to come with iconc . What should I do?

Just so you know: I've changed the lib/Makefile to call these programs as totex.icx and so I'm able to get the whole thing to build, but noweave doesn't work then, so I did it all from scratch and stopping to this point above to ask this question here because the only I thing I have different from Jim is that he might have had the iconc compiler and I don't. (He's also on Windows 7 apparently, but I don't think that makes any difference at all here.) Thank you!

Answer 1

I've just started using Windows 10 and I've installed the Debian linux environment from the Microsoft Store (weird to type that). This is under the Windows SubsystemforLinux (WSL). I first updated the default software, as they recommend:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Following that, I installed aptitude, the Debian package manager I prefer ( apt-get install aptitude ), then emacs and noweb. (I use both for almost all my work.) Installing noweb, pulls in tex and other supporting programs into the WSL .

I just created a simple noweb file and noweave produced compilable tex, which worked fine with pdflatex. Thus, it appears to be much easier now to get noweb to work on Windows 10.

A potential caveat is that I don't yet fully understand how the two systems (native Windows 10 and WSL linux subsystem) interact together. Earlier today, I found that I couldn't not save a file from Emacs running in the native Windows 10 environment to the WSL Debian linux environment. But I can save a file to the native Windows 10 file system from WSL linux Emacs. So while one can now relatively easily install noweb on Windows 10, it may be too cumbersome a workflow.