[Fedora-packaging] fortran .mod files

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 06:12:04PM -0400, Ed Hill wrote:
> Here is the latest from the GCC gfortran developers:
> 
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/2007-10/msg00324.html
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/fortran/2007-10/msg00325.html
> 
> Since there is no guarantee, it is (at least in theory) possible for a
> Fedora GCC update to cause *.mod file incompatibilities.  It seems
> rather unlikely, though.

We can assume that it is only for branch releases.
 
> Maybe this issue could be best handled as a check-list item when GCC
> updates occur?  There are only a small number of Fedora packages that
> provide *.mod files.  And they could be re-built whenever GCC is
> updated.

It means that the API is broken with every gcc release. This is a 
lot of pain. gcc, g77 and g++ have much more stable API/ABI. But 
maybe this is the max occurence of breakage and it is not systematic?

For us it is a bit annoying, but not too much since there aren't that
much f90 packages and we are used to fix things, but for users,
especially in science, it is likely to be very problematic since it 
implies that they must rebuild their in-house libraries very often.

Anyway, it is not like if we have any choice. What could be interesting
would be to have gfortran maintainers state for each release whether 
the .mod API was broken or not. And dependng on that we could make an
announce for fedora packagers, like it is done when new gcc features
requires a rebuild.

--
Pat