Re: [RFC] 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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