> On Thursday, January 2, 2003, at 03:44  pm, Igor Sobrado wrote:
> > But when a package has serious problems and it is not fixed,
> > stability is bad.
> 
> I've never used g77 (and I don't know anyone who has), but
> what are the serious problems?

It is practically dropped by GNU, they are developing a new compiler,
and g77 is frozen since mid-90.  That compiler does not support
FORTRAN-related standards.  It has known bugs and, as I observed
above, it is a FORTRAN 77 compiler with "some" FORTRAN 90 extensions.
A fully standards-compliant compiler will be nice.

The Physics Department of our University dropped it in 1996.  We are
running a license of a commercial FORTRAN compiler on all the Linux
workstations of people that develops FORTRAN code.  They bought a
license of the HP FORTRAN compiler for HP-UX in 1996 too.  They had
a lot of problems sharing FORTRAN program with other research groups.

It is not a high-quality product, it cannot be compared with gcc or g++.
And there are not a lot of users that need it.  A FORTRAN compiler is
a nice compiler for a Unix system, but g77 is *not* the alternative.

A list of bugs is in http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77/Trouble.html,
but this list is a bit outdated.

> Those reasons are good enough for it to be in pkgsrc, imho.
> Sometimes it's hard to say what is "required" and what is widely
> used, but in this case it's seems quite clear.

Agreed.  There are not a lot of g77 users, and it is not required
for NetBSD (it is not used to build the kernel or the entire system).
It can be provided as a port.

> > Moving it to the ports collection is not bad.
> 
> No, it's good :)

:-)

> I fully agree. The java compiler is a good example of something
> (else) that shouldn't be in the base system.

Currently, there are a lot of operating systems (Solaris and IRIX
for example) that provide java in the base system.  (Sun is replacing
the good sdtaudio, the audio tool provided with the operating system,
with a Java-based player!)

> Not related to this mail, but more to your mail about /usr/conrtib,
> I'm still wondering why postfix is in gnu/dist/postfix since
> "IBM PUBLIC LICENSE VERSION 1.0 - SECURE MAILER"
> isn't exactly GNU...

There are some differences between GPL and the IBM Public License, agreed! :-)

Returning to the /usr/contrib thread... perhaps providing all that software
as "contributed packages" or third-party packages is better.  I agree with
Andrew Brown, the Gnu source three looks like a non-BSD tree.

Igor.

-- 
Igor Sobrado, UK34436 - sobrado@acm.org