[bug #58917] A host gcc plus an absence of gfortran should fail quickly

[Boud Roukema]

URL:
  <https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?58917>

                 Summary: A host gcc plus an absence of gfortran should fail
quickly
                 Project: Reproducible paper template
            Submitted by: boud
            Submitted on: Sat 08 Aug 2020 04:05:39 PM UTC
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

I'm filing this as a usability bug. :)

To quote from commit f90dcea:


Until this commit, in the case of (i) a project that is known to
need gfortran, and (ii) a user who enables the '--host-cc'
option, and (iii) a host system with gcc but without gfortran,
the './project configure' script gives a big warning about the
need for gfortran and the fact that it is missing, and waits for
5 seconds, but it continues anyway. This means that a lot of time
and cpu cycles are wasted compiling non-fortran software that are
unusable. In an automated test, or in the case of a user who goes
away for coffee for 10-20 minutes or a few hours, this is a
waste.

With this commit, 'project' and
'reproduce/software/shell/configure.sh' are modified so that if
'need_gfortran' is set to 1 in the 'project' file, along with
other environment variables, then the configure stage will halt
immediately if --host-cc is requested and gfortran is not
found. This immediate failure is more likely to be what the user
will expect than a late failure.


https://codeberg.org/boud/maneage_dev/commit/f90dcea57e895c48c8ba56941a22bbdc92b14d32

Possible improvements would be to modify the warning to be a bit more tolerant
towards non-gcc people, e.g. clang people (do they have flang?). :)

The _need_gfortran_ flag is set to off in this commit.





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