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

[Michael Schreckenbauer <grimlog@gmx.de>]

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.

Regards,
Michael