[gentoo-user] Re: Do we have to build gcc with fortran now?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 06/24/2011 10:18 PM, Michael Schreckenbauer wrote:
> Am Freitag, 24. Juni 2011, 08:04:43 schrieb Nikos Chantziaras:
>> On 06/24/2011 01:16 AM, Dale wrote:
>>> If it works with fortran turned on, I'd leave it alone. With hindsight,
>>> I should have left well enough alone anyway. It wasn't hurting a thing.
>>> Watch the elog messages. It will tell you at some point to either enable
>>> fortran or emerge some other package that I forget the name of. That one
>>> package pulled several dependencies on my rig. YMMV.
>>
>> Well, as I said in another post, I do have -fortan in my make.conf and
>> there are no problems.  I do not have programs installed that need a
>> fortran compiler.  And I do not have kde-meta installed; that's a waste
>> of resources.  I only install what I actually need.
>
> You have no programs, that *need* fortran, but it could well be, that you have
> programs installed, that perform better when compiled with a fortran compiler.
> I think of sci-libs/fftw here as an example. It's used by programs like
> blender, imagemagick and maybe some others. The developers of said library use
> fortran, because they benchmarked it. If you disable fortran, you use the
> slower C fallback solution. If you disable fftw in those packages, you get a
> slower implementation too afaik.
> After all, gentoo is a source based distribution. We all already have a couple
> of languages installed. There's a C compiler a standard user will never use.
> There's a C++ compiler only used by programmers. We all have them, only to
> compile programs, that need them.
> Why not enable fortran, even if it's only optional, to get the best of the
> available implementations? In the end it's only one programming language more
> installed on your system.

Because there is absolutely no clue in the USE descriptions that this is 
the "best implementation" or whatever.