[petsc-dev] make all PETSc Fortran examples modern freeform?

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   We had a user who had trouble because he named his file
>   “wrong”. People have trouble dealing with .F .f .F90 meaning
>   different things and just randomly using some extension and having
>   it not work and not knowing how to fix it.
>
>    Thus I proposed that we have a configure flag that force PETSc
>    makefiles to automatically use free-form for all extensions (we
>    could make that the default). 

The problem is that each configure flag is another thing to test and
another thing to keep in mind when trying to debug.  The .F versus .F90
difference is not specific to PETSc.  At some point we have to draw the
line and declare something to not be a PETSc issue.

>    Otherwise for each user that comes along we have to give an email
>    tutorial on how to compile there code as free form or fixed form
>    and get them to change extensions. They won’t understand and then
>    there will be several iterations of email. This is all wasted time
>    for both use and them.  Telling people to put a particular string
>    attached to FFLAGS in the command line or makefile is not a good
>    fix because they will always forget it and screw it up.

I don't mind changing the default, but making the default (with our
makefiles) different from the compiler default is just one more thing
for users to bump into.

Reconfiguring PETSc must not be the only endorsed way to fix the issue
because we need to enable users to combine projects written in different
dialects.
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