Assess need to support g95/Cygwin

[Ian Culverwell]

Action 6 DRI ROPP 7

Project Team to assess in the next user survey how many users are using g95/Cygwin and, depending on the outcome, potentially propose dropping support for the combination. SG to agree prior final decision is made.

[Dave Offiler]

There have been no new G96 build for Cygwin since June 2010 (and for Linux since Jan 2014) http://www.g95.org/downloads.shtml, so this project appears to be moribund (again). Should a US show a requirement for ROPP builds on Windows/Cygwin, I would propose that we support only GFortran which is nowadays a key component of any Linux distro (including Cygwin) as part of the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) and to formally drop G95.

The package should still contain the configure mini-scripts, but these would be frozen and there would be no beta-testing using G95 on Cygwin.

[Dave Offiler]

Correction: Last G95 Linux build (and source code update) was 17 Jan 2013 (not Jan 2014). (Last Cygwin build was 2010 as noted above, so even 18 months ago many releases out-of-date vis-a-vis the last source version). Development of G95 therefore looks at best suspended or worst abandoned, and Cygwin has effectively been unsupported for some years.

I propose that ROPP-8.0 be the last release supporting G95/Cygwin and only then as long as dependency packages can be built on this combo 'out of the box'. Thereafter this combo is not beta-tested and any build assistance (mini-scripts, etc) is provided only as legacy files and eventually removed (as for v.old ifort compilers) - unless there is a large (>10) confirmed user-base.

[Dave Offiler]

Raised as an agenda item and discussed at ROPP GG of 29/7/2014. All partners confirm they have no requirement to use the G95/Cygwin combo in processing chains or for testing/evaluation. The GG agreed to my recommendation to drop support for this combo immediately for ROPP-8, and to drop G95/Linux for the next release should the US4 indicate no significant usage of this either.

'Dropping support' means:

• retaining the *_configure_g95_cygwin mini-scripts in the ROPP-8 (at least) tarball

but:

• do no beta or other testing with this combo
• do not fix any reported issues with this combo not common to GFortran/Cygwin or any Linux compiler
• note this status in the ROPP-8 Release Note and Change Log.

Since this is a technical issue and there is no commitment to support any particular set of compilers, there is no need for an SG decision.

Closing this ticket. A new one (#378) opened equivalently for G95/Linux at Milestone ROPP-9.