On 01/12/2014 02:53 AM, Ryan Hill wrote:
> fortran:
> Do we want to keep enabling fortran by default? The majority of users will
> never get the urge to install a fortran package, and the fortran eclass
> handles
> those that do. I think it should be treated as all the other optional
> languages and disabled by default, but I'd like to know if there are other
> opinions.
A lot of "popular" fortran code is old scientific stuff without a build
system, license, upstream etc. that isn't going to be in the tree for
that reason. Some of these have only "install gcc" for build
instructions, so it might cause confusion for a few minutes if "gcc"
can't compile fortran. The only popular modern example I have on hand is
sage[1].
The two easy choices for what-to-do are,
* Disable everything by default.
* USE-default everything to match GCC's default --enable-languages[2]
(c, c++, fortran, java, objc)
Either one is fine. A one-time gcc rebuild for fortran is not a big deal
and at that point is probably the least of your problems.
[1] http://www.sagemath.org/
[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html
