List of gfortran-ready libraries and packages

[Tobias Burnus]

  On 10/01/2010 05:48 PM, Bud Davis wrote:
> This is a wonderful idea.
> Windows is hard.  Well, I think it is hard because I know so little about it.  A
> package including a gui would be very helpful.
I agree. I think for Windows users it would matter most.

> For linux, we should have a 'repository' (or a couple, one for ports, one for
> yum, and one for apt-get) that all a linux user has to do is use the existing
> packaging system.
> yum update fortran-goodies

It is not really clear what you suggest to put there. The Linux 
distributions I use all ship with MPI, LAPACK, BLAS, GSL, etc. Thus, 
while I see a need for POSIX bindings and possibly a whole bunch of 
smaller items (such as Arjen's collection or the Fortran bindings to GSL 
[FGSL]) I think there is not much beyond. - Unless you want to start 
something really big like a webpage which lists (in a useful way) the 
most import libraries - which can be huge number given how diverse the 
field is - and offers them for download. While I like such an idea, I 
think I do not have the time to substantially contribute to that.

> or something that would bring them all onto the system.
> I am volunteering to set this up for RH/CentOS/Fedora on gfortran.org.  But
> someone would need to provide the rpm's for the libraries and such.

I think one can also use the openSUSE Build Server; while I have not 
done it, one can also use it to build packages for Red Hat or Debian. It 
depends also what kind of packages you would like to produce.

> the projects out there that just provide source are great; but the audience is
> limited...not everyone is willing to compile from scratch.
> probably because a lot of fortran users are experts in other fields, and fortran
> is just a tool.

I have the feeling that under Linux the problem is smaller than under 
Windows. First, all Linux distributions ship the most important 
libraries and secondly the compilation is mostly setup such that it 
easily works under Linux. Under Windows it is more work to compile and 
install packages - and most users are used to have a ready package 
available.

Tobias