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

[Matthias Klose <doko@cs.tu-berlin.de>]

Kevin B. McCarty writes:
> 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.

It's a design decision. I put the .so and .a into the compiler private
libdir to be able to install more than one compiler version in
parallel. You can get these symlinks by installing the gfortran-X.Y
package.

  Matthias