Martin Michlmayr wrote: > GCC 4.2 was released on May 13 and has been in unstable since roughly > that time. The default version of gfortran was recently switched to > 4.2 and the Debian GCC maintainers would like to move to 4.2 as the > default compiler in unstable for all architectures and for all > languages with the exception of Java (which will follow later). > This message describes the plan to make this transition possible. Hi Martin, Does this imply that all FORTRAN-using packages will need to move from g77-3.4 to gfortran-4.2 in the near future? To my knowledge there has been no mass rebuild of FORTRAN packages with gfortran yet to see how smoothly this will work out... As I understand it the challenges involved in a mass switch to gfortran are two-fold. First, gfortran and g77 by default produce code with different ABIs (at least for functions that return REAL or COMPLEX; possibly also in other cases?) so probably a transition plan for libraries, similar to the C++ ABI change transitions, will be needed. Second, another complicating factor is that since gfortran is not going to provide an f77 or g77 symlink (I understand this is because it is not a complete standards-compliant implementation of a FORTRAN 77 compiler), all the build infrastructures of FORTRAN packages will need to be altered so that they call gfortran instead of f77 / g77 / $(FC) / $(F77). best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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