BaCon dependency removed from OE

Many years ago, I was keen on BaCon. It converts traditional BASIC language to C and then calls gcc to create an executable. The problem I have is that it is cross-compiler-unfriendly.

Host x86_64 and target x86_64, compiled in OE, it would generated executables, but some simply didn't work. Host x86_64, target i686, compiling in OE is broken.

I have previously rewritten some in C, however, there still remained picscale', 'popup', 'pup_event_ipc', 'find_cat' and 'debdb2pupdb'.

Those last two were rewritten in C back in 2015, by iguleder (dimkr), for woof-CE. Iguleder has improved them also, much faster. Thanks very much for doing that, have copied those into the 'pup-tools' package, replacing the previous BaCon ones.

A big job to rewrite 'picscale', 'popup' and 'pup_event_ipc', so I cheated. BaCon generates C code, which it then compiles. I have taken that intermediate C code and created new source packages. They can be found online:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/source/alphabetical/p/

'picscale' was written in BaCon by vovchik, and I used his version 0.1c. The source converted to C is now 'picscale-20180622.tar.gz'.

EDIT 2022-08-08:
Oh dear, I tested 'picscale' and got a segmentation fault. I recall now, Easy is built with a picscale PET that was compiled in the old Easy Pyro-series. The Dunfell-series has a later version of BaCon.

This has been a problem, later versions of BaCon breaking the executable, even if it still compiles. For now, going back to using that old PET. Total removal of BaCon dependency is postponed. 

EDIT 2022-08-14:
In cooperation with BaCon developers, issues with BaCon now fixed:

https://bkhome.org/news/202208/the-return-of-bacon.html   

Tags: easy