What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

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Imortis
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Imortis »

I ran the tests with the following command:

make log-tests FBC=<compiler path here> ALLOW_CUNIT=1

It looks like that is the problem, if I run without ALLOW_CUNIT I get 0 failures. I was running it that was because I am compiling on windows and have no CUnit lib.

Did I miss something?
St_W
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by St_W »

I'm running the tests without that argument and am using a customized cunit library: https://bitbucket.org/st_w/fb-jenkins/s ... ?at=master
You can also find binaries (for win 32/64 and linux 32/64) there

Code: Select all

make log-tests
make cunit-tests auto=1
I can't remember having ever used the ALLOW_CUNIT flag - it's possible that there's some issue when using that.
Imortis
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Imortis »

I fixed it! I looked back through and found another simple solution (not as simple as the old one), but it looks like it is fixed! Test suite results are the same as the unmodified FBC and it disallows the Suffixes outside of -lang qb and -lang deprecated

Okay... How to I get ready to merge this back into the main repo? Do I need to fork? I have only used git for my own code before now.

EDIT: Never mind. I figured it out. Pull request submitted.
EDIT 2: Ultimate test: I was able to re-compile the compiler itself with the fixed version of the compiler. I am pretty sure it is good.
St_W
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by St_W »

Imortis wrote:Okay... How to I get ready to merge this back into the main repo? Do I need to fork? I have only used git for my own code before now.
Thanks for your work!

Just some hints about using git: please do not submit a pull request from your master branch, but create a dedicated development branch for your fix. On that branch commit your changes and then submit the pull request for that branch. The branch can be automatically deleted afterwards via Githubs's web interface as soon as the commit has been merged into master in the official fbc repository.
Additionally please use git's facilities to commit changes to your fork and not GitHub's "upload file" feature. If you do not want to use git on the command line I'd suggest "SmartGit", which is free for non-commercial use and is available for all common platforms. In your commit you somehow have overwritten the whole file instead of just changing the relevant parts. That's bad for tracking changes. Maybe you've changed line-endings or indentations? Please not do so and leave the format as-is.

You can also have a look at the pull request by stephanbrunker submitted recently: https://github.com/freebasic/fbc/pull/36
He did everything correctly as far as I can see.

If you need any help please just ask or look for one of the many git tutorials on the web.

That may also be a little help to understand the reasons, although in your case you should redo the whole commit instead of following the steps described on that page to fix it (because the commit is somehow wrong too, as mentioned above):
https://coding.abel.nu/2015/03/fixing-a ... om-master/

Again if you need any help don't refrain to ask.
Imortis
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Imortis »

Yeah, I noticed that is showed the whole file as different... I was unsure how to fix it. I have an idea of how to fix it now, so I will do that. Also, I will make a new pull request on a branch as you suggest. Thanks for the info.
Imortis
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Imortis »

St_W wrote:Again if you need any help don't refrain to ask.
I'm pretty sure I got it right this time. Could you please eyeball it and see if there is anything I missed?
St_W
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by St_W »

Imortis wrote:I'm pretty sure I got it right this time. Could you please eyeball it and see if there is anything I missed?
The pull request looks fine now regarding the formalities. You've even fixed the typo in your username :-)
I can't tell a lot about the content and you'll have to wait anyway for dkl or counting_pine (is there anybody else?) to review your changes and merge them into master. (or tell you to do some additional modifications, which you can do directly on your patch branch now without having to change the pull-request)
Imortis
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Imortis »

Thanks for your help. I only every used versioning systems as glorified cloud storage with roll-back before, so this I was unaware of the proper use. After reading what you posted and a few other things it became clear to me what EXACTLY I should be doing.
dkl
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by dkl »

Hi,

regarding the release making... I think it would be good to rely on an automated build server like St_W's, and possibly split the work/responsibilities between multiple people, each responsible for their platform. Why should someone make DOS releases, if they don't know and care about it.

Doing it manually by using virtual machines takes a lot of time and is error prone (not automated = bad), and cross-compiling generally doesn't work (sure, the gcc cross-toolchain works, but many libraries don't support cross-compiling, and there's always some autotools script that breaks).

I've tried using Travis CI for release builds, but unfortunately they run only Linux x86_64. And cross-compiling to linux-x86/win32/win64 takes too long (build time is limited).
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by St_W »

dkl wrote:[...] Doing it manually by using virtual machines takes a lot of time and is error prone [...]
Which OS versions did you use for the builds - especially for the Linux build? I'm aware of the libc dependency that often prevents use on old Linux machines - are there any other such dependencies on certain library versions?

And I've noticed that a failing (unit-) test case now lets the whole test execution fail, which in turn aborts the Jenkins job. Maybe somebody interested in learning something about the compiler and its testsuite could look into the failing test "fbc_tests.string.format.number format test" on 64-bit Windows (it works on the other platforms). IMHO it should be fixed before the next version is released.
dkl
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by dkl »

It was some older OpenSUSE x86 and x86_64 for Linux builds, which had an old enough glibc to work on Debian stable (if I remember correctly), and didn't cause visible issues like Symbol `ospeed' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking (which I think relates to ncurses) on other systems. Besides that, 32bit Windows for win32/dos, 64bit Windows for win64.

I've enabled travis builds (running build, self re-build and test suites for 32bit and 64bit on linux-x86_64) for freebasic/fbc on github, hence the test suite changes.
Lost Zergling
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by Lost Zergling »

Hi everybody !

Some very good questions are interesting me :
How do we move forward?
Has the design philosophy of freeBASIC changed?
Are we willing/able to put in the effort to learn the current code so we can change it and if so, how do we even get started?
I agree speedfixer opinion :
be persistent For each person with his or her own talent...add your talent even if you feel you are not worthy
Even tiny little improvements are a step forward

I take note of this. Thank you. For my part, I'm preparing a very debugged & updated version of my LZ list engine with new functions.
I got ideas about keywords extending the design in a basic like spirit. I lean for an open source L-GPL or Cecill-C license in freeware for any use under Freebasic. The more the complexity, the more the tons of bugs, the more working time needed.
As an ex-application designer, I feel more at ease with designing than with pure coding. Each competency a step forward.

Let's go ahead !
grindstone
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Re: What to do about a lack of developers for the compiler?

Post by grindstone »

BasicCoder2 wrote:Perhaps someone might be up to translating some C tutorials into FreeBasic?
http://slav0nic.org.ua/static/books/C_C ... torial.pdf
Your wish is my command. Here you are:
http://users.freebasic-portal.de/grinds ... 0Tutorial/
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