To Andrew and Arjen:

The forthcoming 5.9.11 release that I have tentatively scheduled for
year's end is only ~7 weeks away so now would be an excellent time to
do the cleanups I discuss below.

@Andrew: Do you agree that the octave bindings that are generated with
the ENABLE_matwrapped_octave=ON option are no longer useful?  If so,
would you be willing to take responsibility for completely removing
that brand of octave bindings to simplify our build system and also to
get rid of some files that are only useful in the matwrapped case?

@Arjen: We made a plan early in the 5.9.10 release cycle
(i.e., something like two years ago) to completely eliminate f77 two
(development) releases after 5.9.10 came out. Users who were following
svn trunk should have been well aware of this plan (since f77 was
disabled by default) for those two years.  On the other hand, our more
typical users were only informed of this plan as of the release of
5.9.10.

My current release manager thinking is 5.9.11 will come out near the
end of this year and 5.10.0 a month or less later with nothing but
bug-fixing changes from 5.9.11 to the release of 5.10.0.  So our
publicized plan for the complete removal of f77 corresponds to the
release of 5.11.0 (assuming we continue with the odd minor numbers to
designated development releases) some time in the middle of 2014.
That's a relatively long time from now, and, in any case, I prefer
cleanups like this to occur before stable releases to help simplify
that stable release.  Therefore, I think we should go ahead and do the
complete removal of f77 now.  I suspect there is now zero interest in
f77 which, after all, is a 3-decade old standard.  Furthermore, we
certainly received no complaints about disabling f77 by default during
this last release cycle or since the release of 5.9.10.  So if you
agree it is time for the complete removal of the f77 bindings and
examples, I am willing to do the work in the next few days.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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