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Re: gfortran



On 09/10/16 04:17, Benny Siegert wrote:
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?


Or, perhaps a USE_GFORTRAN variable in mk.conf, to let the user indicate that gfortran should be used for all package builds?

For now, I do all my bootstrapping with auto-pkgsrc-setup (http://acadix.biz/pkgsrc.php), which warns the user if gfortran is not detected in the base system.

Some people in the HPC (High Performance Computing) community (most of whom use CentOS 6 or similar) are starting to look more closely at pkgsrc and I intend to promote it more aggressively in the near future. This could mean many more Fortran packages appearing.

Anyone doing HPC will want to use a recent gfortran compiler for all their package building because they have much better optimizers than g95 and some newer programs simply won't compile with g95. Pkgsrc currently works well with gfortran from the RHEL Yum collection, but the ability to use a modern Fortran compiler will be needed for other platforms that don't have gfortran in the "base".

Regards,

    Jason

--

Those who spend their lives in the shallows see their whole world in turmoil
whenever the wind blows.

Those who explore the depths see only ripples at the surface of an otherwise
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