Martin,
I'm sorry if we came off as brash and inconsiderate. I definitely was not advising that we shouldn't package gfortran 4.1-CVS out of ideology, or blindly following rules. Hopefully my explanations here can allay your concerns.
First, I agree with you that every package should have representation in Fink. If there was no gfortran in Fink, I would want one. But we already have gfortran as part of gcc4 4.0.1. The question so far as I understand it is what version should be in Fink, the released 4.0.1 or the pre-release CVS snapshots from 4.1.
Sometimes we do release CVS snapshots, and I don't think there should be a policy "snapshots are never, ever ok". There are plenty of cases where pre-release software should clearly be in Fink:
* Other packages, which we want in Fink, depend on unreleased features.* There's a critical bug in the last release version, and it's impossible to backport a fix. * There are important new features/bugfixes in unreleased versions, and there's no prospect of a new release any time soon.
* Only the snapshots actually work, older versions are broken.But when it comes to including pre-release software, we face the strong possibility that things aren't ready for release (hence the name). This is why we don't have daily CVS checkpoints of GTK+ for example. We already have a working, reasonably stable package. And we can be pretty sure there will be a new release in a few weeks or months, so the new features will get to users. It's not worth it to break GTK+ every time some committer to their CVS repository screws up.
Basically, we don't want to turn our users into unwitting beta- testers when they update-all.
The arguments for including gfortran 4.1-CVS all seem to have better solutions than putting 4.1-CVS in Fink unstable, here are the ones I've seen:
- To practice gfortran packaging, so Fink can get 4.1 quickly after it is released. This is what experimental is for!
- So GCC can allow users to test gfortran 4.1 snapshots. This can be done without making every Fink user beta-test, by telling users who actually want test 'download this .info file, put it in your local finkinfo dir and type fink update gfortran'.
Now I don't know much about Fortran or gfortran development, so maybe I've completely missed something. It's possible that there won't be a gfortran 4.1 release for two years, or that the gfortran in Fink is currently unusable. So if I've misunderstood anything, kindly correct me and we'll get gfortran 4.1-CVS into Fink.
Dave
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