Re: gfortran

[Benny Siegert <bsiegert%gmail.com@localhost>]

> Am 08.09.2016 um 17:32 schrieb Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 08:56:50AM -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:
>> I started a similar discussion a couple years ago.  The response was that
>> g95 is the only thing that works on many platforms and pkgsrc is committed
>> to portability.
> 
> That's not the point. The point is that all the alternative packages
> like gcc49 etc are much more heavy by including things like the Java
> backend. You can easily select a different implementation, but for
> casual users, it is way too heavy.

For the record: I prefer something that’s heavy to something that does not compile at all. I submitted a PR a while ago where I tried to install some package on Linux, and it tried and failed to build g95. gfortran worked. 

If a user does a bootstrap, then bmake package-install and gets a failed build until they manually configure the right fortran compiler (something that they most likely do not care about), then that’s a terrible experience.

If g95 is a good default for some platforms and not a good one for others: perhaps we can have a default that’s set in platform Makefiles?