Re: gfortran: OK, I quit, you win

From: Brooks Moses (bmoses-nospam_at_cits1.stanford.edu)
Date: 01/19/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:04:45 -0800

Richard E Maine wrote:
> In article <Y2AHd.102637$nN6.67813@edtnps84>,
> Gordon Sande <g.sande@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > TEX is available under a different set of packaging.
>
> Oh. I wasn't actually aware of that prior to this thread. Probably
> largely because I never felt the need to look. I quickly found TeX
> (along with most of the other free software that I wanted for my Mac) on
> fink and so just installed the fink copy, which has been working fine
> for me. Having quickly found a working solution, I never bothered to
> look elsewhere. Maybe someday if I find I'm unhappy with the fink
> install, I'll do differently.

Completely off-topic, but as I mentioned offhandedly in my other post, I
believe the non-fink TeX distribution has a very tight interaction with
the Mac font system. What I've seen of it was nearly good enough to
make me consider buying a Mac, though that may partly have been that I
was using it on a shiny pretty 21" iMac at the time. It may be worth
looking into to see what additions it has, rather than merely as a
replacement if you find yourself unhappy with fink's TeX.

> I know that some people don't like fink (sometimes rather vehemently),
> but I'm a fan. Hard to beat
>
> fink install tetex
>
> as an installation procedure. (For those who don't know fink, that line
> *INCLUDES* downloading the thing; I don't have to first go find it
> somewhere and then run that line). Ok, I did first have to install fink
> (and beat our firewall folk into letting it work), but I had alrady done
> that for other things anyway.

I wonder, as a Windows/Cygwin user, how much fink is a parallel to
CygWin. They both have the goal of making their underlying operating
system act (more) like a proper unix, they both have reasonably good
software packaging (on Cygwin, installing teTeX is only barely more
difficult, and only because it's GUI rather than command-line), and they
both make it a lot easier to port a Linux/Unix program such a TeX or
GFortran to their OS without significantly changing it. And they both
seem to have people who've installed them and would consider a computer
without them to be effectively crippled, but also have people who
vehemently dislike them.

If the parallel is that clear, I think it's equally clear that the
solution for packaging GFortran should be the same: make fink and Cygwin
ports that are near copies of the Linux and Unix code and setup, and
make native-OS ports that act more like native-OS applications (which,
on Windows, would mean installing in C:\Program Files\GFortran rather
than in C:\cygroot\usr\local\bin, for instance).

- Brooks 

-- 
The "bmoses-nospam" address is valid; no unmunging needed.

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