[McIDAS #TPS-344560]: use of gfortran in building McIDAS

Hi Becky,

re: is MUG evaluating support for gfortran

> At this time, we're not making the switch from g77 to gfortran.  As we
> are with every compiler change, we're concerned about how it will affect
> people's local code and also the problems that might come up during
> system testing.

I understand completely!

> We also found that gfortran doesn't run on all of our
> supported platforms, so we'd have some platforms running gfortran and
> other platforms running something else.

OK.  If you know the list of machines that gfortran does not run on, please
send them along.

> Dave Parker said that the last
> time we made a decision about compilers, gfortran was still immature and
> not a viable option at the time.

That was my impression when I made a run at using gfortran in the late fall, 
2006.
The version that I now have on my home development machine (Fedora Core 6):

  % gfortran --version
  GNU Fortran (GCC) 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-13)
  Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

  GNU Fortran comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
  You may redistribute copies of GNU Fortran
  under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
  For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING

appears to have matured significantly.

> That said, we do plan on discussing
> this at the MUG Meeting in October, and if the users feel it's
> important, then we'll work on making the switch.

Very good.  My inquiry was spurred by the great number of netCDF inquiries
we are now seeing that mention use of gfortran on a variety of platforms.
Also, since gfortran gets installed with a full development installation
of Linux (at least of RedHat and Fedora Linux), and g77 does not, I figured
that the handwriting was on the wall that we should consider moving from
g77 to gfortran support.  (Plus, I have had one user who asked when I would
be supporting gfortran :-()

> I'll also write up an inquiry to fix some of the things that you found
> during your testing.  If you've made the changes already, perhaps you
> could pass along your changes to us?

I will update the CVS with the code modifications that I mentioned.  All of
the ones I have seen so far are nice and simple, so they won't require
any special testing.

Just so you know... I am making the code modifications in my v2007 release and
hope to have support for building with gfortran available by next week.

> Thanks, Tom!

No worries.  Thanks for the feedback!

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: TPS-344560
Department: Support McIDAS
Priority: Low
Status: Closed