On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 06:28:58PM +0100, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
> On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 06:48:17PM +0200, Rafael Sadowski wrote:
> > Before I go deeper into the rabbit hole I would like to ask for
> > feedback.  Below you can see my idea. I would like to update lapack,
> > blas and cblas. Upstream project has decided to use cmake and build
> > everything in one. I like it because it makes the current situation
> > simple.
> 
> Would it make sense to use a reasonably modern egfortran, i.e. gfortran 11,
> still supported by upstream:
> https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-11/
> over the default gfortran 8.4, which is long past its expiry date:
> https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/

One issue is that gcc-8 and gcc-11 can't be installed at the same
time.  That cannot work for bulk builds, so you'd need to switch the
whole ports tree to gcc-11.  And someone has to volunteer to handle
that transition.

Being able to install multiple versions seemingly brings less
friction.  But it also brings another set of problems (C++ ABI changes
for examples) and I doubt that it would help much in the long run.

-- 
jca