Homebrew tap for Fortran?

1

I’m interested in getting some insights from the MacOS based Fortran users here.

  • Do you use homebrew on a regular basis?
  • Is homebrew useful for Fortran development?
  • Should we have fortran-lang homebrew tap with fpm, LFortran, fypp, …?

I started maintaining a homebrew tap for fpm a while ago for my students, which could be used as starting point:

While I’m not a MacOS user, I tried getting some of the formulas into homebrew-core, however some projects were rejected for being alpha/beta versions which would be more suitable for a user/community maintained tap.

3 Likes
2

I don’t use homebrew because it requires sudo. So I use Spack and Conda. Conda works really well, so far I did not manage to get Spack working on Apple M1. I just tried the latest version, which currently fails with macOS M1: Spack fails to bootstrap · Issue #28190 · spack/spack · GitHub. In the past it failed with other issues.

3

Homebrew is how I install gfortran on the Mac. Works great.

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4

Only when installing the homebrew itself, as it creates (by default) /usr/local/ tree, then it makes chown and it is user space since then.

Fortran (currently 11.2) works fine. There is even opencoarrays tap.

5

I use Homebrew for automated gfortran, MPICH, OpenMPI, and OpenCoarrays installations. The painful part is the automatic updates to Homebrew with every brew invocation, sometimes lengthy. I would be happy to try any better options available (Ondrej mentioned Conda, which I have not tried).

6

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll take from this that homebrew is quite useful, but we don’t need to maintain a tap in the fortran-lang namespace at the moment.

In case anyone is interested in collaborating on a Fortran specific tap, let me know, and I can add you as maintainer to my repository.