Grex Garage Conference

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Grex Garage Item 42: /cyberspace/contrib policy
Entered by papa on Sat Jun 24 00:03:51 UTC 2017:

What is the policy on putting files under /cyberspace/contrib? Anything a
member thinks would be useful to others, or should there be some evaluation
process?

13 responses total.

#1 of 13 by papa on Sat Jun 24 12:27:18 2017:

... Or is it for member-created software only?

#2 of 13 by cross on Mon Jun 26 14:54:01 2017:

It's user-only software (not just member). Some users have been added to
the group that can write into that directory hierarchy because they've
demonstrated proficiency and good judgement; what they put there is up to
their discretion. Have fun!

(papa, I' think you are in the group.)

#3 of 13 by papa on Tue Jun 27 12:19:40 2017:

(Yes, I am, Thank you.)

#4 of 13 by papa on Tue Jun 27 12:22:28 2017:

So are the BASIC interpreters I downloaded and compiled (bas, bwbasic)
appropriate to install in /cyberspace/contrib, or would you rather do a normal
site installation into /usr/local?

#5 of 13 by cross on Tue Jun 27 18:19:53 2017:

/usr/local is only for stuff installed via ports/packages; that'd be
my first choice for something like a BASIC interpreter. Let me see if
one is available.

Otherwise, /cyberspace/local would generally be the place for that.

#6 of 13 by cross on Tue Jun 27 18:24:53 2017:

Hmm, it appears that something called bacon is installed.  That's a
BASIC to C translator.  Does that work?

#7 of 13 by papa on Wed Jun 28 23:23:25 2017:

Not at the moment. I'm getting a missing library error, which suggests that
the bacon installation is incomplete:

==========
Compiler error:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lbacon
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
==========

Bacon looks interesting, but it appears to implement its own version of BASIC,
which I can't tell how compatible it is with other BASICs until I run some
old sources through it.

I note that bwbasic is available on pkgsrc.org (while bacon isn't).

#8 of 13 by papa on Thu Jun 29 00:03:12 2017:

libbacon.a is in /usr/local/lib, so I can get past the above error by adding
the argument "-l-L/usr/local/lib" when runnning bacon.

The next error produced is the following:

==========
Compiler error:

Description:
         file 'helloop.bac' line 1: FOR I=1 TO 10
Cause:
         strcat() is almost always misused, please use strlcat()

==========

However, the above is not actually an error, but more like a warning, since
a working executable file is still produced. You can change the above message
to one that looks like a warning by adding the argument "-o '-Wno-deprecated
-Wno-deprecated-declarations'", but I don't think it makes a difference.

Immediately obvious quirks in BaCon BASIC:

- Does not support numbered lines.

- Keywords must be ALL-CAPS (-z argument is supposed to allow lower case
  keywords, put produces an error)

#9 of 13 by mijk on Sun Jan 28 18:36:28 2018:

I was just about to start a topic requesting the package: bwbasic, to be
installed here on Grex; as i found this topic, i thought i would add this to
the discussion here.
I have just started palying about with BASIC, and bwbasic is my weaponj of
choice. It is in most of the UNIX-like O/S repos, and runs on multiple
platforms. It is very close to the classic basics alot of people would have
grown up with, and includes various options to make it compatible with a  long
list of classic BASIC implimentations. It runs in the terminal without the
need for an x-server. And i like it. :) (it is very close to the BASIC used
in my old Computer Studies textbooks from the early 80s also)

So: could we have  bwbasic here on Grex? <grovel>

#10 of 13 by cross on Mon Jan 29 03:11:24 2018:

If it's in the ports collection, then sure. But it doesn't seem to be.
Hmm. That's kind of lame.... Let me see when I get a spare moment.

#11 of 13 by mijk on Mon Jan 29 21:35:12 2018:

Suprising actually. I run a debian based distro, and they have an ancient
version of bwbasic, as most linux distros seem to have. Linux mint has version
2.10, which seems to be from 2002. But, there is a new release of bwbasic on
sourceforge, which is version 3.20 dated 2017-07-07. It has some major new
features - like matrix operations. Alas being such a newb i couldn't get it
to compile on my machine :( but i got to read the files and see the new
features, which looks very good) It would be nice for openBSD to have a newer
version then version 2, but any version would be good. 
It has been ported to a few other platforms also. It runs on a few of the IBM
mainframe operating systems, aswell as DOS and POSIX systems.

#12 of 13 by papa on Sat Feb 24 01:01:22 2018:

I'd almost forgotten this item.

I think mijk and others have been using bwbasic from my ~papa/share directory,
but I'll put copies of bwbasic and bas under /cyberspace for posterity's sake.

#13 of 13 by papa on Sat Feb 24 01:46:44 2018:

I've put source for both bas and bwbasic in /cyberspace/contrib/src and
executables in /cyberspace/contrib/bin. (And removed the same from
~papa/share/bin.)

The bas manual page has also been installed in /cyberspace/contrib. bwbasic
documentation is spottier, but docs for older versions are here;

  http://web.cs.mun.ca/~ed/cs2602/basic1.html
  http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/bwbasic.1.html
  http://purple.niagara.edu/boxer/essays/soft/bwbasic.htm

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