Removal of Fortran from the base system

Hi;

FWIW, I think I am right now the only user of gfortran in
the ports tree as I
use it for the elmer* ports and really soon for MUMPS (which
is finished but
being tested).

First of all I should mention g77 and gfortran are not ABI
compatible by
default, and specifying -ff2c to gfortran is not always
easy; this has meant,
for example, that it was necessary to add a suboptimal
package called
elmer-mathlibs (with blas, lapack and arpack/parpack) just
for elmer. 

Libraries generated with g77 will not interoperate with the
gfortran stuff and
some packages (math/blacs comes to mind) will need to be
patched to work with
gfortran. That said, gfortran41 is a pretty good replacement
to g77.

I wouldn't count much with Intel's compiler since it's a
binary that we can't
redistribute and has platform limitations. g95 is better and
much more used but
it is not easy to package (I tried on amd64).

I don't have clear atm if it's a good idea to remove
fortran or not but NOT
having a fortran compiler in the base system would be
extremely weird. A couple
of questions to think about:

- Will we need a package with the shared libraries that come
with gfortran?
many packages depend on blas/atlas and other libraries that
need fortran but a
run dependency on the compiler package would be excessive
IMHO.

- Perhaps we could remove of the C compiler too? not
everyone builds
kernels/ports and the gfortran compiler package happens to
include a good C
compiler .

cheers,

    Pedro.

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On Saturday 27 May 2006 13:31, pfgshield-freebsdyahoo.com
wrote:
> - Will we need a package with the shared libraries that
come with gfortran?
> many packages depend on blas/atlas and other libraries
that need fortran
> but a run dependency on the compiler package would be
excessive IMHO.

Why?
This is no different to building, say, pygame.. Yes it needs
Python, wow, what 
a suprise 

> - Perhaps we could remove of the C compiler too? not
everyone builds
> kernels/ports and the gfortran compiler package happens
to include a good C
> compiler .

Fortran isn't used for the base system, C & C++ are.
(Yes I saw the smiley 
	
-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20
7B3F CE8C

--- Daniel O'Connor <doconnorgsoft.com.au> ha
scritto: 

> On Saturday 27 May 2006 13:31, pfgshield-freebsdyahoo.com
wrote:
> > - Will we need a package with the shared libraries
that come with gfortran?
> > many packages depend on blas/atlas and other
libraries that need fortran
> > but a run dependency on the compiler package would
be excessive IMHO.
> 
> Why?
> This is no different to building, say, pygame.. Yes it
needs Python, wow,
> what 
> a suprise 
> 

It is different, Fortran is a compiler...unlike python and
java you shouldn't
need the compiler once the executables are produced.


> > - Perhaps we could remove of the C compiler too?
not everyone builds
> > kernels/ports and the gfortran compiler package
happens to include a good C
> > compiler .
> 
> Fortran isn't used for the base system, C & C++
are.
> (Yes I saw the smiley 
> 

I think I use about 10-25% of the base system, and for that
I only need the C
compiler to rebuild the kernel, but with kld's that is
becoming less necessary
each day. Removing fortran (which I really use a lot) is in
certain way a
reminder that we should move more towards using the
packaging system in the
base too, and ideally depend less on a specific version of
gcc.

Actually I think the fortran removal from base is the way to
go. Unfortunately
the ports tree is not prepared for it, and I would expect
breakage in the math,
science and ports categories. Not good but it had to be
fixed some day anyways.

    Pedro.

Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale! 
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messe
nger.yahoo.com 
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On Sun, 2006-May-28 00:19:58 +0200, pfgshield-freebsdyahoo.com
wrote:
>Actually I think the fortran removal from base is the
way to
>go. Unfortunately the ports tree is not prepared for it,
and I would
>expect breakage in the math, science and ports
categories.

At some stage, a ports cluster run will need to be made with
the
existing f77 command disabled to shake out the ports that
will
break.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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