On 7/20/07, Pablo De Napoli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Concerning (2)
>
> I think that if a gfortran it is already installed in the system, it
> would be reasonable to use rather than downloading a binary.
Issues:
(1) If it's gfortran 3.x then it will fail miserably at building
certain components of SAGE.
(2) The current gfortran.spkg already does attempt to autodetect
gfortran and if it is there it
doesn't install a binary. It is too restrictive, as once
pointed out before.
> (gfortran
> is in fact, a standard part of gcc, if gcc from the host system is
> used for compiling the parts of sage writen in C, why not doing the
> same with Fortran code?
I don't understand this comment. Many many systems have gcc/g++
installed but not gfortran. For example, OS X's Xcode doesn't include
any Fortran, and there are at least 3 different competing gfortran binaries
for OS X out there. Similarly with Linux, there are various builds
of gfortran, and often systems don't have it installed at all (about
half my test linux systems). Also, e.g., if you install the standard
Fedora Core 7 (32-bit) gfortran it will fail to compile SAGE, whereas
the one we package works. There is also another GNU fortran
called g95, which competes with gfortran (even though both are
GNU projects). For whatever reason, the fortran compiler situation
is a total nightmare in comparison to C/C++.
> I think that in order to increce the aceptance of Sage, it would be
> important that Sage be included in all Linux distributions, especially
> it would be nice to have a Debian/Ubuntu package (and a Gentoo
> ebuild). But in order to make it easier, it would be nice if Sage
> could be build using the tools already available in the host system.
I agree. Please help.
> Perhaps using the binary for gfortran could be make it optional as a
> last resource if everything else fails.
Determining that "everything else fails" doesn't make sense, because
you basically wouldn't know that happened until it is too late.
It's really very difficult to appreciate the problem and difficulty with
packaging scipy to build easily on a wide range of platforms if you
haven't spent significant time working on it, so I don't have much more
to say on this point, except that Josh and I will investigate some other
solutions, possibly including switching from gfortran to g95 binaries
(since g95 has vastly vastly better support for pre-built binaries that
gfortran).
-- William
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