[open-cobol-list] cobc linkage bug on Mint Linux ?

[Patrick]

This thread is a continuation of Linux Mint Borked.

I changed the title as I think the urgency and focus has changed.

Brian has mentored me for quite a few months now. I respect him and his 
work and I am sure you all do too.

If I post code on the net and it does not build and run, who cares. If 
Brian does the same, I think this is a concern but even more so if it 
runs on one prominent distro but fails on another prominent distro.

I was inspired by this post:

http://sourceforge.net/p/open-cobol/discussion/109661/thread/4c62cbb1/

To try and embed jim, a small foot print Tcl implementation.

I failed many times and tried many things. In the process I tried 
Brian's cobpy.cob program on Mint and it failed but it and my jim.cob 
program ran on Debian stable.

I changed many things during this first process, installing and 
re-installing software, building from source, downloading from repos 
etc. At the end I didn't think I could piece together what really happened.

While my jim.cob program was running on Debian stable there were other 
issues with Debian stable that made me want to modify my set up.

Here is what happened during the second set of attempts.

I installed Debian as a console only OS and then installed Mint 15 
Cinnamon desktop 64 bit and dual booted the machine,

To my dismay my program failed under Debian. I tried again on Mint. I 
tried and tired to get it to work for many evenings changing 
environmental flags and such but it just did not work. It finally dawned 
on my to try Brain's program again and it failed to.

I installed XFCE on Debian and my program and Brain's program are now 
both running fine now.

On both distros I installed open-cobol, libjim-dev and python-dev from 
the repos.

I have attached Brain's program at the end of this email.

Both my program and Brain's ended up with errors about libcob not being 
able to find a module, in the python case it was "Py_Finalize'.

If things work out of the box on GUI-Debian but fail out of the box on 
Mint, does this sound like a bug introduced by Mint ?

Does anyone have a fairly new install of Mint 15 to double check my 
findings? Can anyone run this on Ubuntu to see if it's introduced upstream?

According to DistroWatch, Mint is the most popular Distro with Ubuntu 
being second. It would not be good if our compiler cannot play nice with 
C on these Distros.

This is off topic, sorry, but has anyone found a posix complaint 
operating system that "just works" as a development environment? Various 
bugs have left me with an unusable system and forced to re-install at 
least 5 or 6 times in the past year and I have probably re-installed 50+ 
times for various reasons in the past year.

Sadly I am writing this from a Windows machine. My only concern right 
now is finding a better development environment, GUI-less is an option 
for me, I am no longer concerns about applications.

Thanks for reading, sorry if this email is a bit of a downer-Patrick

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      *>>SOURCE FORMAT IS FIXED
      *> *******************************************************
      *> Author:    Brian Tiffin
      *> Date:      20130126
      *> Purpose:   Embed Python
      *> Tectonics: cobc -x cobpy.cob -lpython2.6
      *> *******************************************************
       identification division.
       program-id. cobpy.

       procedure division.
       call "Py_Initialize"
         on exception
             display "link cobpy with -lpython2.6" end-display
       end-call
       call "PyRun_SimpleString" using
         by reference
           "from time import time,ctime" & x"0a" &
           "print('Today is', ctime(time()))" & x"0a" & x"00"
         on exception continue
       end-call
       call "Py_Finalize" end-call
       goback.
       end program cobpy.