[Patch] Edit contrib/ files to download gfortran prerequisites

[Damian Rouson]

On October 21, 2017 at 11:17:49 AM, Bernhard Reutner-Fischer (rep.dot.nop@gmail.com(mailto:rep.dot.nop@gmail.com)) wrote:

>  
> + die "Invoking wget and curl in the 'download_prerequisites' script failed."
>  
> I suggest "Neither wget nor curl found, cannot download tarballs.”

Thanks for the suggestion.  I have now replaced the previous message with your suggested one.

>  
> As an open-mpi user i question why this hardcodes MPICH, fwiw.

The primary reason is because Fortran 2015 has features that support the writing 
of fault-tolerant parallel algorithms. GCC 7 supports these features using OpenCoarrays,
which in turn uses features that are in MPICH 3.2.  I don’t think there is anything
comparable in an OpenMPI release yet, although I’m aware that OpenMPI developers are
working on it.  

Nonetheless, I would be glad to add a “—-with-mpi” flag that would enable users to specify
the MPI of their choice. We could also allow for non-MPI options.  For example, OpenSHEM
has been tested as an alternative recently.  Either way, I’m thinking I’ll hold off on 
investing any more time in this patch for now.  It seems unlikely to be approved for the
trunk until other work completes and it’s uncertain when the other work will complete.

Damian