On Jul 15, 2007, at 17:06, source_changes@macosforge.org wrote:

Revision: 27018 http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/changeset/27018 Author: mww@macports.org Date: 2007-07-15 15:06:34 -0700 (Sun, 15 Jul 2007)

Log Message: ----------- add new commands for selecting compilers: * configure.cc, configure.cxx, .. work just like configure.cflags (no default values) * configure.compiler lets you select a whole compiler collection; this will preset most compiler variables (configure.cc, ..) with their compiler frontend of that compiler version (currently can do gcc-3.3, gcc-4.0, macports-gcc-[0-2])

Interesting! What is the intent? Initially of course this could simply replace the explicit configure.env setting that we're doing in some portfiles. I hope though that this is also intended to take care of the situation where many portfiles explicitly use the system's gcc4 on darwin 8, which I don't understand because that should be the default anyway. This has bugged me for a long time. Even some of my portfiles do it, because they were like that when I took over maintenance of them and I don't want to remove those lines until I understand why they were added in the first place. It seems like it only guards against users who have used gcc_select to select a different default compiler. Users should not do that, of course... but now that we have this configure.compiler option, we could make "gcc-4.0" the default on darwin 8 and "gcc-3.3" the default on darwin 7. Wouldn't that be the best idea? Then we could remove the darwin 8 variants from so many ports. The macports-gcc-4.[0-1] options won't work, by the way. The gcc33, gcc34, gcc40 and gcc41 ports all still install with the "dp" suffix, not the "mp" suffix used by the gcc42 and gcc43 ports. Since we're on a DP-to-MP naming switch kick recently we should probably go back and fix this for the older GCCs, but we'll have to update a lot of portfiles too. FYI: I corrected the log message (it should have ended "macports- gcc-4.[0-3]"). I see you didn't add options for macports-gcc-3.[3-4]. I agree we don't need one for gcc33. I see there's only one port that depends on gcc33 -- ftidy -- and that only in a variant. I would be inclined to remove that variant and the gcc33 port itself. Any objections? There a couple more ports that depend on gcc34 -- cfitsio (for fortran), pgplot (for fortran, on all but darwin 8 i386, where it uses gcc42's fortran), ftidy (again in a variant), mercury, algae (presumably for fortran), fftw and fftw-single (for fortran), lam (for g77), p5-extutils-f77 (for fortran), py-scipy03 (for g77), and pdftk (only in a variant). None of those have maintainers, except pdftk (me). Perhaps these can all be updated to use gcc42's fortran, but it would take some work to test it all. Should we be offering a "macports-gcc-3.4" compiler option after all?