put fortran back in base?

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

It was brought to my attention that there was an old PR from 2009
suggesting adding fortran back to base (by including the gcc fortran
frontend) because otherwise various messy things happened with pkgsrc
packages using fortran.

Those particular pkgsrc issues no longer apply, but others do, and
there's been some talk about that lately -- the default in pkgsrc is
g95, but g95 is old, dead upstream, and not without issues; the
alternative is building a pkgsrc gcc with fortran but this, in
addition to being a general pain, potentially leads to problems with
the pkgsrc gcc and base gcc not being quite compatible.

Meanwhile, much as we'd like to pretend fortran is dead, it's not and
that's not going to change in the foreseeable future. It's certainly
reasonable to include a fortran compiler in base, as well as
historically accepted. I don't know if we ought to or not, but I think
it's worth noting the pros and cons.

(for reference, the PR is 41220)

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost