Bug#449433: Should a package supply libgfortran.so and libgfortranbegin.a in /usr/lib?

["Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU>]

Package: gfortran-4.2
Version: 4.2.2-3
Severity: minor

Hi Matthias et al.,

Prompted by a couple emails [1] to the ROOT devel list, I'm curious as
to why no package in Sid seems to provide a libgfortran.so symlink
[without the soversion] nor libgfortranbegin.a directly in /usr/lib.
This makes it difficult to link a program with the main routine written
in FORTRAN using g++ or gcc as the driver for ld.  Currently one needs
to add -L/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.2 to the linking command before
supplying -lgfortran -lgfortranbegin .

[1] I'll supply a link to the thread when it becomes available on the
web archive of roottalk.

Is this an oversight, or a deliberate design decision?  Not knowing
which, I couldn't decide on the severity of this bug, so I set it to
"minor".  In Etch there was a libgfortran1-dev package that did supply
these files (and was depended upon by gfortran-4.1), but nothing
equivalent exists in Sid.

thanks and 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