Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 01:01:18 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fortran conundrum Message-ID: <199812230901.BAA00688@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 21 Dec 1998 22:49:19 PST." <199812220649.WAA46833@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
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> As I promised Mike Smith, I have been looking over the Fortran > situation in -current. From the last round of email, we had > essentially 3 opinions: > > (1) Status quo You make a good case for this being unsupportable. > (2) Upgrade to g77 -- g77 produces "better" code than f2c+gcc, and it > is designed to integrate smoothly with the core compiler technology > when an upgrad finally occurs. > > Unfortunately, g77+0.5.23 is designed to work with gcc+2.8.x, and > the author(s) of g77 warn to not even try to back port g77 to any > earlier version of gcc. The jury is still out on the gcc-2.8 vs. egcs issues. However, I think that the general feeling is that this is a bad trend. Fortran is an important application, but it's not part of the core system. > (3) Rip Fortran out of the base distribution. > > This seem to be the logical choice (provided f2c can be converted > to a port). I have been merging our f2c and the sources from netlib > with the intend to produce a port. There is, however, one major > caveat that needs to be address. /usr/bin/f77 is a driver program > which sets up an execution of our Fortran-aware gcc frontend > (see src/gnu/usr.bin/cc/f77). I have been unsuccessful in moving this > driver out of src/gnu, and still retain its functionality. Can you clarify on the problems inherent in moving the f77 executable? > Thus, I recommend removal of f2c and libf2c, but we retain our > current f77 and Fortran-aware gcc. I'll work on providing a > a patch to gnu/usr.bin/cc/f77 (and its man page) to deal with > the moving of f2c to the ports collection. > > Comments? Basically, I think that (3) is the approach of preference for now; it offers the best of all the possibilities - f77 remains available for those that want to continue to use it, and g77 (or any other enahced version) becomes a full alternative. It would be desirable to have f77 leave the main tree, but most definitely leave the Fortran awareness in the 'gcc' driver program, as well as the system Makefiles. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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